tfy 


t* 


fcibrarp  of  €he  theological  ^eminarp 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


•«®i 


PRESENTED  BY 

The  Estate  of  the 
Pev.  John  B.  Wie&inger 


BV  4832 
Mof fatt 
Reasons 


.M52 

James,  1870 
and  reasons 


1944. 


REASONS  AND  REASONS 


BV 


JAMES    MOFFATT,  B.D.,  D.D.,  D.Litt. 


The  candid  incline  to  surmise  of  late 

That  the  Christian  faith  may  be  false,   I   find  ;  .   .   . 
1  still,  to  suppose  it  true,  for  my  part 

See  reasons  and  reasons." 

Browning:    Gola  Hair,  xxix.-xxx. 


HODDER   AND   STOUGHTON 

NEW   YORK    AND     LONDON 


Printed  in  ign 


To 

E.  H., 
D.  H.  L., 

AND 

G.  P.  C. 


CONTENTS 

i 

Page 

The  God  who  is  Above i 

II 

Considering  Jesus 13 

III 
The  Great  Love  of  God 23 

IV 
Seeking  and  Sought 33 

V 
The  Balcony  View  of  Life      ...  -43 

VI 

A  Daughter  of  Jacob 53 

VII 
How  God  is  Paid 65 

VIII 

The  Customs  of  Jesus 73 

IX 

The  Great  Estimate  of  Jesus         ....      83 

vii 


CONTENTS 
X 

Page 

Loyalty  to  God 93 

XI 
Faith  and  Love  their  own  Defence       .        .         .103 

XII 
The  Only  School? •     in 

XIII 
Forgetting  to  Pray 121 

XIV 
The  Abuse  of  Religion 129 

XV 
The  Unready  Guest 139 

XVI 
Afterwards 149 

XVI I 
The  Opportunity  of  the  Provincial       .        .         .157 

XVIII 
Fear  in  the  Night 167 

XIX 

The  Compensations  of  God 177 

XX 
Love's  Labour i#9 


I 

THE  GOD    WHO  IS  ABOVE 


Ij  I  beheld  the  sun  when  it  shined, 

Or  the  moon  walking  in  brightness  ; 
And  my  heart  hath  been  secretly  enticed \ 
And  7ny  mouth  hath  kissed  my  hand : 
This  also  were  an  iniquity  to  be  punished  by  the 
judges : 
For  I  should  have  denied  the  God  that  is  above. 

Job  xxxi.  26- 


[ 

THE   GOD    WHO  IS  ABOVE 

This  also — this  impulse  of  superstition,  this 
secret  sin  of  deference  to  material  forces,  is 
repudiated  by  Job.  The  other  misdeeds  come 
home  to  us  across  the  centuries.  He  protests  that 
he  is  innocent  of  sensual  desire  and  act,  of  social 
injustice,  of  callousness  and  churlish  conduct,  of 
niggardliness  and  of  hypocrisy.  Most  of  these 
faults,  even  when  they  are  inward,  are  luminous 
enough  in  any  age.  They  beset  wealth  and 
power  in  every  condition  of  the  world.  But  the 
force  of  this  temptation,  or  at  any  rate  its  form, 
is  Oriental,  and  it  can  hardly  be  appreciated  at 
once  except  by  those  who  have  had  to  live  and 
travel  in  tropical  or  semi-tropical  countries.  Under 
our  climate  and  civilization  we  can  barely  conceive 
the  fascination,  almost  the  tyranny,  exercised  over 
the  primitive  mind  by  these  brilliant  heavenly 
bodies  which  move  through  cloudless  skies  with 
unearthly  grandeur,  the  emblems  not  simply  of  a 
weird  beauty  but  of  a  varied  power,  since  upon 
them  the  health  and  fortunes  and  even  the  move- 
ments of  men  largely  depended.    It  is  little  wonder 

B  2  2 


4  REASONS    AND   REASONS 

that  the  sun  and  moon  were  worshipped  in  Arabia 
and  in  Assyria,  and  that  this  tempting  superstition 
struggled  up  occasionally  like  a  bright,  foreign 
weed  among  the  Hebrews  themselves.  Insensibly 
the  sun  and  moon  entered  so  directly  into  the 
business  of  life,  that  even  a  devout  soul  like  Job, 
who  was  no  votary  of  these  shining  bodies,  found 
he  had  to  resist,  as  an  actual  temptation,  the 
impulse  to  wave  a  kiss  to  the  upper  lights — so 
obvious,  so  strong,  so  entrancing — that  touched 
his  life  at  almost  every  hour,  very  much  as  the 
Irish  peasant  of  to-day,  under  some  religious 
emotion  drawn  from  the  ancient  paganism  of  his 
race,  will  furtively  cross  himself  at  the  first 
sight  of  the  new  moon.  The  very  habits  of  his 
neighbours  would  suggest  some  momentary  act 
of  adoration  to  the  deities  they  honoured.  It  was 
difficult  for  him  not  to  let  his  heart  be  secretly 
enticed  by  a  prevalent  superstition  which  was 
often  almost  indistinguishable  from  religious  feel- 
ing, or  to  throw  a  hasty  kiss  to  the  great  lights 
of  comfort  and  terror  which  seemed  the  very 
masters  of  his  existence. 

An  Oriental  temptation  !  Yes,  but  men  and 
women  are  being  enticed  to-day  by  precisely  the 
same  feeling  which  haunted  the  ancient  nomad 
on  the  plains  of  the  East,  the  feeling  that,  after 
all,  things  visible  and  outward  present  the 
standards  by  which  life  should  be  regulated.  The 
great  questions  of  the   religious  experience   are 


THE   GOD   WHO   IS   ABOVE  5 

often  old  questions.  For  us  they  are  newly 
shaped  and  differently  stated,  perhaps,  but 
ultimately  they  remain  the  same.  Analyze  them, 
and  they  turn  out  to  be  perennial.  It  is  still  a 
moral  discipline  to  resist  the  fascination  of  what 
meets  and  moves  the  senses.  It  is  still  a  strain 
to  refuse  our  moral  reverence  to  the  physical  and 
material  phenomena  which  bulk  so  largely  in  the 
scheme  of  our  actual  life.  Over  our  work  and 
pleasure  alike  they  preside,  not  always  gross  or 
vulgar,  thrusting  themselves  upon  our  notice, 
apparently  owning  no  divine  control,  suggesting 
no  higher  providence,  claiming  to  be  considered, 
and  appealing  both  to  our  sense  of  admiration  and 
to  our  prudence.  Take  the  things  of  this  world 
in  any  of  the  practical  and  tangible  shapes  which 
affect  our  employment  and  enjoyment.  They  have 
a  part  to  play  in  human  life.  "  Blindness  to  the 
glory  of  the  world  and  irreverence  towards  its 
spiritual  forces  are  the  worst  of  passports  to  any 
Church  worthy  of  the  name."  For  a  Christian  man 
to  neglect  or  depreciate  the  significance  of  power 
or  wealth  or  culture  or  art  or  trade  or  politics 
or  science,  is  as  disastrous  as  it  would  be  for  a 
traveller  in  the  East  to  expose  himself  rashly  to 
the  sun,  or  for  a  nomad  to  regulate  his  nocturnal 
movements  without  heeding  the  phases  of  the 
moon.  But  for  one  person  who  suffers  from  such 
religious  imprudence  there  are  probably  nine  who 
are  in  danger  of  the  opposite  temptation  to  let 


6  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

these  interests  become  a  substitute  for  God.  In 
the  State,  in  the  Church,  and  in  the  family  we  are 
exposed — often  to  our  great  loss — to  the  dazzling 
prestige  of  the  material  world.  It  may  usurp  an 
importance  in  our  minds  to  which  it  has  no  right, 
and  we  may  be  induced  to  let  ourselves  become 
engrossed  with  certain  aspects  of  its  brilliance  and 
influence  to  the  exclusion  or  the  displacement  of 
anything  like  that  reverence  for  the  God  who  is 
above,  which  is  essential  to  Christianity. 

Such  a  devotion  to  material  interests  will  often 
seem  a  comparatively  venial  sin.  It  is  less 
blamed  because  in  many  instances  it  does  not 
come  at  once  into  action  with  the  same  grossness 
as  the  other  offences  from  which  Job,  for  example, 
clears  himself  in  this  defence.  Most  of  these 
ripple  the  surface  of  life,  like  the  ugly  fin  of  a 
shark.  But  this  is  essentially  a  furtive  offence. 
Primarily  it  is  a  secret  compliance  with  existing 
superstitions.  It  is  an  estimate  rather  than  an 
appetite,  at  the  outset.  For  the  world  assails  us 
by  imposing  on  our  imagination  as  well  as  by 
rousing  our  passions,  and  the  former  temptation 
may  be  admitted  into  life  without  producing 
immediately  much  visible  change.  It  is  a  mark  of 
the  alert  conscience  to  consider  such  a  secret  weak- 
ness as  ominous  and  blameworthy  as  the  coarser 
forms  of  evil.  This  also  were  an  iniquity.  In 
reality  it  is  a  temper  opposed  to  all  that  is  divine 
and  devotional.    Once  we  vield  to  it  in  our  outlook 


THE   GOD   WHO   IS   ABOVE  7 

upon  the  world,  this  momentary  impulse  of 
deferring  to  material  things  will  begin  to  affect 
our  practical  judgment  and  so  to  expand  into  a 
habit  of  the  outward  life. 

Some  are  more  liable  to  this  temptation  than 
others,  owing  to  temperament,  and  the  force  of  it 
varies  according  to  circumstances.  In  one  form 
it  becomes  a  scientific  materialism,  in  another  the 
aggressively  secular  temper  which  longs  to  survey 

"The  universal  Nothing  undisgraced 

By  pert  obtrusion  of  some  old  church-spire 
I*  the  distance." 

But  with  people  who,  like  Job,  are  neither  specu- 
lative nor  irreligious,  it  tends  to  become  an  almost 
involuntary  susceptibility  to  the  spirit  of  the  age, 
which  slowly  saps  the  forces  of  self-sacrifice  and 
prayer  and  spiritual  enterprise.  The  splendour  of 
the  sun  and  moon  thrills  even  the  European 
traveller  to  a  half-sympathy  with  the  impulsive 
homage  which  an  Oriental  will  pay  to  these 
heavenly  bodies.  All  day  long,  with  ache  and 
glare,  the  heat  which  elsewhere  ministers  to 
luxuriant  growth  pours  like  scorching  rain  upon 
the  sands.  Night  falls,  and  the  moon  succeeds 
this  fiery  torment  with  ruddy  or  silvery  light  for 
the  wayfarer.  Where  can  one  escape  the  penetrat- 
ing influence  of  these  shining  powers,  which  seem 
to  have  the  earth  at  their  mercy?  So  it  is,  in  a 
corresponding  sense,  with  the  pageant  of  positive 


8  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

objects  and  actual  forces,  full  of  colour  and 
motion,  which  in  modern  civilization  seem  not  so 
much  to  deny  as  to  ignore  God  altogether,  with 
their  sweep  of  massed  influence  and  tangible 
achievements,  never  absent  from  the  spheres  of 
human  interest  and  imagination.  They  are  so 
solid,  so  persuasive,  so  steady.  You  feel  your 
heart  sometimes  flutter,  in  spite  of  itself,  as  a 
wave  of  secret  delight  comes  over  your  better 
mind.  "  Here  is  real  life,"  you  are  tempted  to 
say ;  "  here  is  something  definite  and  substantial, 
to  live  for  and  to  live  by,  a  system  of  principles 
and  aims  which  is  both  intelligible  and  promising." 
Faith  in  the  visible  order  of  things  has  so  much 
in  its  favour.  Where  the  influence  of  the  invisible 
is  a  tremor,  outward  things  make  an  impact  on 
the  mind  and  heart.  Their  pressure  is  hardly 
ever  relaxed.  You  have  only  to  listen,  to  lift  your 
eyes,  to  stretch  out  your  hand,  and  there  is  the 
world  of  secular  instincts  and  activities.  You  do 
not  need  to  seek  it;  at  every  step  its  powers  are 
thrown  around  you ;  they  are  not  faint  or  hidden, 
they  come  up  close  to  you  in  every  enterprise  and 
aim.  And  it  does  require  a  moral  effort,  par- 
ticularly at  certain  moments,  to  retain  the.  true 
perspective,  to  believe  that  there  is  a  God  who  is 
above,  a  Presence  and  a  control  of  the  Spirit 
which  has  a  higher  claim  upon  our  reverence  than 
the  most  vivid  of  things  outward  and  transitory. 
Many  a  religious  character  is  ruined  by  nothing 


THE   GOD   WHO   IS   ABOVE  9 

more  flagrant  than  a  failure  to  resist  this  secret 
transference  of  worship  from  the  God  who  is  above 
to  the  fascinating  powers  and  interests  of  the 
world.  There  is  no  reason  why  the  devout  man 
should  not  do  justice  to  these.  He  may  even, 
like  Job,  be  prosperous  and  shrewd.  Objects  of 
the  senses  may  tempt  us  to  the  pursuits  of  a 
cynical  or  sensual  existence;  they  may  lead  to 
indolence  or  the  pampering  of  the  flesh  or  selfish 
ambition.  But,  like  the  sun  and  moon,  they  are 
set  in  the  natural  order  for  man's  true  welfare, 
and  his  must  be  the  blame  and  shame  if  they  are 
allowed  to  impose  on  the  imagination  and  to 
capture  the  soul,  till  life  is  secretly  enticed  into 
a  misplaced  devotion.  It  is  no  small  triumph  to 
have  the  answer  of  a  good  conscience  in  this 
matter.  To  be  able  to  repudiate  this  also,  like 
Job,  is  a  proof  that  as  Christians  we  have  learnt 
how  to  use  the  world  without  abusing  it. 

If,  in  one  aspect,  the  advances  of  civilization 
have  rendered  this  temptation  more  subtle  and 
versatile  for  us  than  for  the  ancient  Oriental,  we 
have  more  than  he  had  to  keep  before  our  minds 
and  hearts  the  God  who  is  above  this  pageant  of 
imposing  and  dazzling  phenomena,  with  all  their 
loveliness  and  strength  and  order.  In  the  teach- 
ing and  spirit  of  Jesus  Christ  we  possess  unique 
resources  for  maintaining  faith  in  the  unseen. 
There  are  diverse  ways  of  making,  or  rather  of 
permitting,   the   invisible    realities    of   grace   and 


io  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

reverence  and  service  to  stand  out  luminous  and 
graphic  before  our  minds.  "  The  gospel  of  the 
blessed  God,"  said  Jonathan  Edwards,  "  does  not 
go  abroad  a-begging  for  its  evidence  so  much  as 
some  think."  Christianity  furnishes  us  with 
reasons  upon  reasons  for  declining  to  transfer 
our  homage  from  the  God  and  Father  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  to  any  of  the  great,  shining 
powers  that  sweep  across  and  over  life  with  maj  estic 
control  and  imposing  fascination.  These  reasons 
are  implicit  in  its  revelation  of  God  and  man  as 
spiritually  akin.  God  summons  us  to  walk  by 
faith  and  not  by  sight,  and  yet  to  walk  through  a 
world  where  this  outward  business  and  beauty  is 
going  on  from  day  to  day,  charged  with  interest 
and  help,  stamped  with  divine  approval.  One 
voice  bids  us  decry  it  all.  But  it  is  not  a  voice 
from  Christianity,  though  it  has  been  often  taken 
up  by  Christians.  Another  voice  whispers, 
"  Worship  this  :  it  is  all  you  need."  But  that  is 
an  inspiration  from  below.  We  dare  not,  as 
Christians,  view  this  life  except  as  Jesus  viewed 
it,  with  His  sense  of  proportion  and  His  vision 
of  God's  kingdom  as  the  first  thing  to  be  sought. 
To  let  anything  in  the  world,  even  in  the  religious 
world,  be  more  of  a  reality  than  the  will  and 
worship  of  the  Father  almighty  is  to  deny  Him. 
Do  as  Job  did.  Shrink  from  any  impulse  of  hope 
or  fear  that  tends  to  make  God  dim  and  distant, 
or    to    divide    your   homage    between    Him    and 


THE   GOD   WHO   IS   ABOVE  n 

another.  This  also  were  an  iniquity.  It  punishes, 
instead  of  enriching,  the  reality  of  your  religion. 

"To  start  thee  on  thy  outrunning  race, 
Christ  shows  the  splendour  of  His  Face : 
What  will  that  Face  of  splendour  be 
When  at  the  goal  He  welcomes  thee  ?  " 

Who  can  tell  that?  Who  does  not  thrill  at  the 
thought  of  it?  But  it  will  be  nothing,  and  there 
will  be  no  welcome  at  all,  if  we  are  failing  here 
and  now  to  maintain  the  vision  of  Him  who  is 
above  all  the  sights  and  shows  of  the  world,  and 
allowing  any  other  splendour  to  entice  our  hearts 
secretly  from  the  high  standards  and  require- 
ments of  Him  who  is  the  true  Lieht  of  the  world. 


II 

CONSIDERING  JESVS 


Consider  the  Apostle  and  High  Priest  of  our  confession,  even 
Jesus. — HEK'.  iii.  i. 


II 

CONSIDERING  JESUS 

The  Christian  religion  is  marked  off  from  other 
faiths  by  the  place  which  it  assigns  to  Jesus  as  the 
Christ  of  God.  Christianity  has  truths  in  com- 
mon with  other  religions,  but  its  distinguishing 
quality  is  the  function  of  Jesus,  who  has  not  only 
revealed  the  purpose  of  God  finally,  but  realized 
it  in  Himself,  and  made  it  possible  for  men  to 
attain  their  divine  destiny.  What  Jesus  thought 
of  God  determines  our  faith  as  nothing  else  can 
ever  do,  and  what  Jesus  has  done  underlies  the 
Christian  effort  and  aspiration.  This  may  sound 
obvious,  but  it  is  never  irrelevant  to  the  thought 
and  practice  of  Christianity  to  lay  stress  upon 
His  person  as  the  basis  and  security  of  our  hope, 
any  more  than  when  the  writer  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  summoned  his  readers,  as  -partakers 
of  a  heavenly  calling,  to  consider  the  Apostle  and 
High  Priest  of  our  confession,  even  Jesus.  As 
Christians,  we  have  our  confession  of  faith.  But 
to  possess  a  confession  or  creed  does  not  neces- 
sarily imply  that  we  understand  its  significance  or 
appreciate  adequately  its  bearings.     Speaking  of 

15 


16  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

the  country  gentlemen  under  Charles  the  Second, 
and  their  love  for  the  English  Church,  Macaulay 
remarks  that  "  their  love  of  the  Church  was  not, 
indeed,  the  effect  of  study  or  meditation.  Few 
among  them  could  have  given  any  reason,  drawn 
from  Scripture  or  ecclesiastical  history,  for  adher- 
ing to  her  doctrines,  her  ritual,  or  her  polity;  nor 
were  they,  as  a  class,  by  any  means  strict  observers 
of  that  code  of  morality  which  is  common  to  all 
Christian  sects.  But  the  experience  of  many  ages 
proves  that  men  may  be  ready  to  fight  to  the 
death,  and  to  persecute  without  pity,  for  a  religion 
whose  creed  they  do  not  understand,  and  whose 
precepts  they  habitually  disobey."  Wherefore 
consider  .  .  .  Jesus.  Unless  He  is  assigned  His 
true  place  by  those  who  draw  up  a  creed,  and 
unless  those  who  accept  that  creed  realize  that  it 
involves  a  personal  consideration  of  their  Lord 
in  His  absolute  significance  for  their  own  lives, 
the  gates  are  opened  for  an  inrush  of  aberrations 
in  theology  and  in  practice. 

By  the  Apostle  and  High  Priest  of  our  confession 
the  writer  means  to  express  the  double  function 
of  Jesus  in  our  religion  as  God's  messenger  to  us, 
and  as  our  representative  before  Him,  as  the  final 
interpreter  of  God's  mind,  and  as  the  Redeemer 
who,  by  His  sacrifice,  has  removed  the  sin  which 
prevented  His  people  from  enjoying  that  un- 
hindered access  to  God  which  it  has  been  the  aim 
of  all  religions  to  provide.     The  great  subject  of 


CONSIDERING   JESUS  17 

the  Christian  confession  is  the  oneness  of  man 
with  God  through  Jesus,  who  has  identified  Him- 
self with  our  race,  and  who  alone  is  competent 
to  carry  out  in  us  the  purpose  of  our  calling. 
Jesus  guarantees  to  us  that  goodness  is  not  a  for- 
lorn hope,  nor  a  lonely  enterprise.  We  no  longer 
feel  any  difficulty  about  admitting  His  superiority 
in  this  respect  to  man  or  the  angels.  If  we  own 
Jesus  as  Lord,  it  is  in  a  sense  in  which  neither 
man  nor  angel  can  ever  rival  Him.  But  it  is  more 
easy  to  admit  the  supremacy  of  Jesus  as  Lord 
than  to  understand  how  that  implies  His  human 
sympathy.  To-day,  as  when  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  was  written,  it  is  possible  to  glorify  the 
work  of  Christ  until,  in  our  definitions,  He  tends 
to  become  more  official  than  personal,  or  until 
His  services  are  regarded  as  essential  to  some 
plan  of  salvation  rather  than  as  a  true  labour  of 
love  for  men  into  which  He  put  His  very  heart 
and  soul. 

Whenever,  in  the  course  of  Christian  theology, 
this  tendency  has  become  dominant,  the  Christian 
instinct  has  avenged  itself  for  the  injustice  by- 
breaking  out  in  other  directions  to  satisfy  that 
passion  for  a  personal  and  humane  Lord,  without 
which  no  construction  of  the  Christian  religion  is 
adequate.  Thus,  when  the  mediaeval  confessions 
began  to  obscure  the  person  of  Jesus  with  sacra- 
mental forms,  and  to  obliterate  His  real  humanity 
in  the  regal  offices  of  providence  and  redemption 


18  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

which  He  was  supposed  to  discharge;  when,  as 
Harnack  puts  it,  the  fundamental  questions  of 
salvation  were  not  answered  in  relation  to  Him; 
the  heart  of  piety  swerved  under  the  instincts  of 
pagan  religion  to  the  adoration  of  the  pitiful 
Virgin  Mary,  and  called  upon  saints,  who  seemed 
more  accessible  to  suffering  flesh  and  blood  than 
a  distant,  imperial  Christ.  A  similar  rebound  took 
place  later,  under  Channingand  Theodore  Parker, 
against  the  impression  of  remoteness  and  heartless- 
ness  made  by  the  stern  New  England  Christology. 
The  Unitarian  movement  in  one  aspect  meant 
that  the  orthodox  presentation  of  "  a  cold  Christ 
and  tangled  Trinities"  could  not  satisfy  faith. 
It  was  an  extreme  protest  against  an  extreme  con- 
fession of  faith  in  which  a  Christ  was  set  forth 
who,  to  all  intents  and  purposes,  seemed  out  of 
touch  with  living  men. 

Even  when  the  articles  of  a  creed  do  some 
justice  to  the  humanity  and  sympathy  of  Jesus,  a 
fresh  personal  consideration  of  His  faithfulness 
and  interest  is  always  necessary  to  the  strength 
and  peace  of  the  Christian  life.  As  fartakers  of 
the  heavenly  calling,  we  encounter  temptation  and 
suffering  in  various  forms.  One  effect  of  these 
experiences  is  to  suggest  a  doubt  whether  people 
exposed  to  the  common  temptations  of  life,  in 
their  degrading  and  trivial  phases,  can  have  any 
part  in  the  divine  purpose.  Another  is  the  doubt 
whether  God  understands  how  we  have  to  suffer, 


CONSIDERING   JESUS  19 

and,  if  so,  why  He  does  not  spare  us  much  of 
what  we  have  to  undergo.  It  is  against  such  fears 
and  misconceptions  that  the  human  sympathy  of 
Jesus  is  lifted,  to  rally  Christians.  Our  confes- 
sion of  Jesus  as  the  Apostle  and  High  Priest  im- 
plies that  temptation  and  suffering  may  be  a 
means  of  unity  with  God,  instead  of  a  barrier, 
that  the  Christian  life  of  sonship  has  not  only 
been  sketched  but  realized  by  Jesus  in  the  very 
conditions  which  surround  us,  and  that  He  does 
not  summon  us  to  encounter  any  moral  experi- 
ence which  He  Himself  never  knew.  He  is  not 
ashamed  to  call  us  brothers.  As  the  writer  has 
just  said,  His  interest  is  in  men  of  flesh  and  blood, 
not  in  angelic  spirits.  He  has  lived,  and  He 
lives,  to  enable  us  to  fulfil  our  high  calling,  and, 
through  the  very  experiences  of  temptation  and 
suffering  which  seem  to  thwart  us,  to  partake  of 
the  same  grace  which  He  Himself  enjoyed. 
There  is  no  phase  of  life  so  baffling  or  so  obscure 
that  we  cannot  count  upon  His  presence  with  us. 
These  are  fundamental  truths  of  the  faith  we 
profess  as  Christians.  Wherefore,  in  view  of 
Christ's  unwearied  sympathy  and  faithful  dis- 
charge of  His  vocation  on  earth,  in  view  of  His 
triumph  over  sin  and  death,  wherefore  consider 
the  Apostle  and  High  Priest  of  our  confession. 
The  writer  does  not  speak  as  a  priest ;  the  sacer- 
dotal attitude  would  have  been  incomprehensible 
to  him.  There  is  but  one  priest  for  him,  even 
c  2 


2o  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

Jesus,  who  shared  our  lot  and  carried  through  our 
interests   to   the   end,   till    He   could   say,   It  is 
finished.     Consider  Him,  he  would  urge,  who  in 
His  love  and  in  His  pity  redeemed  us — for  there 
is  no  redemption  worth  speaking  of  except  that 
achieved  through  the  personal   identification   of 
the  Redeemer  with  the  redeemed.    Consider  Him 
who  has  proved  Himself  competent  to  bring  us 
through  temptation  and  suffering  to  a  richer  ex- 
perience of  the  divine  life.     Consider  Him  who 
has  acted  on  God's  behalf  to  us,  and  on  our  behalf 
towards  God.     It  is  in  this  intelligent  considera- 
tion of  Him  that  the  conviction  of  His  absolute 
and  unrivalled  value  will  grow  upon  the  soul. 
Such  a  thoughtful,   living  grasp  of  what  Jesus 
means  will  make  Him  real  to  us  as  nothing  else 
can  do.     It  helps  us  to  understand  that  we  need 
no  one  but  this  merciful  and  faithful  Lord  to  bring 
us  through  the  common  discipline  of  life,  how- 
ever protracted  and  prosaic  that  may  be.     In  his 
essay  upon  Cowper,  Sainte-Beuve  tries  to  account 
for   Cowper's  religious  melancholy  by  his   Pro- 
testantism.     In   reading   the   poet's   lines,   "  To 
Mary,"  the  French  critic  observes,  we  cannot  help 
thinking  of  the  other  "Marie  far  excellence"  \ 
"What  Cowper  lacked  was  trust  in  the  Virgin 
Mary,  who  is  all-pitiful  and  all-powerful  with  her 
Son.     Had  his  heart  been  able  to  receive  this 
further  devotion,   it  would  have  succoured  and 
perhaps  saved  him."     But  this  is  not  a  Christian 


CONSIDERING   JESUS  21 

remedy ;  it  is  superstition.  Cowper  was  at  least  sane 
enough  to  know  the  quarter  in  which  to  look  for 
saving  faith.  He  was  rational  enough  to  under- 
stand that  Jesus  requires  no  one  to  soften  His 
heart  towards  men,  or  to  fill  out  His  interpretation 
of  God's  faithfulness,  and  we  require  no  one  but 
Him  in  our  straits.  In  that  he  himself  has 
suffered  being  tempted,  he  is  able  also  to  succour 
them  that  are  tempted.  Our  confession,  so  far  as 
it  is  Christian,  circles  round  these  words  :  He 
Himself.  And  therefore,  brothers,  you  who 
suffer  disheartening  because  you  are  painfully 
conscious  of  being  tempted,  you  who  are  tempted 
by  your  very  sufferings  of  mind  or  body  to  doubt 
the  reality  of  the  divine  care  and  wisdom,  con- 
sider fesus.  There  is  no  solution  of  the  problem 
if  He  is  left  out.  Given  His  experience,  with  its 
testimony  to  the  character  of  God,  there  is  no 
other  direction  in  which  the  Christian  requires  to 
look.  If  you  keep  Him  in  mind,  as  your  Lord 
and  Leader,  there  is  nothing  He  will  not  enable 
you  to  understand  and  to  undergo. 


Ill 

THE   GREAT  LOVE   OF  GOD 


God,  who  is  rich  in  mercy,  for  his  great  lo7>e  wherewith  he 
loved  us.  even  when  we  were  dead  through  our  trespasses,  quickened 
us  together  with  Christ  {by  grace  have  ye  bee?i  saved),  a?id  raised  us 
up  with  him,  and  ?nade  us  to  sit  with  him  in  the  heavenly  places, 
in  Christ  Jesus:  that  in  the  ages  to  co?ne  he  might  shew  the 
exceeding  riches  of  his  grace  in  kindness  toward  us  i?i  Christ  Jesus : 
for  by  grace  have  ye  been  saved  through  faith;  and  that  ?iot  of 
yourselves  :  it  is  the  gift  of  God :  not  of  works,  that  no  man  should 
glory.  For  we  are  his  workmanship,  created  in  Christ  Jesus  for 
good  works,  which  God  afore  prepared  that  we  should  walk  in 
them.— Eph.  ii.  4-10. 


Ill 

THE    GREAT  LOVE    OF  GOD 

The  faith  of  man  and  the  great  love  of  God 
are  shown  at  work,  in  these  rich  words,  but  it  is 
God's  love  which  determines  and  inspires  belief. 
"  Faith,"  as  Vinet  points  out,  "  does  not  consist  in 
the  belief  that  we  are  saved ;  it  consists  in  the  be- 
lief that  we  are  loved."  Now  it  is  clear  that  the 
knowledge  and  persuasion  of  love  in  God  as  well 
as  in  our  fellow-men  must  spring  from  an  intelli- 
gent grasp  of  its  purpose  and  actions,  from  a 
sense  of  the  particular  objects  which  it  has  in  view 
and  of  the  sacrifices  which  it  is  prepared  to  make 
in  order  to  attain  its  end.  The  first  revelation  of 
God's  great  love  is  in  His  sacrifice  for  men. 
God,  zvho  is  rich  in  mercy  >  for  his  great  love 
wherewith  he  loved  us,  even  when  we  were  dead 
through  our  trespasses,  made  us  live  together  with 
Christ  and  raised  us  tip  with  him.  It  is  by  grace 
that  you  have  been  saved.  Grace  and  mercy  are 
love  in  action  upon  the  sins  of  men.  It  is  the 
crowning  evidence  of  God's  love  that  in  Jesus 
Christ  He  has  stooped  to  redeem  us  from  our  low 
estate.     The  word  over  the  Christian  is.  This  my 

25 


26  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

son  was  dead  and  is  alive  again.  We  have  reason 
to  believe  that  nothing  short  of  the  free  and  full 
grace  of  God  could  have  brought  us  the  saving 
power  which  underlies  our  whole  existence  and 
transforms  us  till  we  achieve  our  high  destiny  as 
His  sons  and  daughters.  We  cannot  lift  our- 
selves to  His  level,  and  we  dare  not  boast  that  we 
are  entitled  to  His  love.  Its  wealth  is  ours,  in  spite 
of  what  we  have  been  and  done.  Behind  and 
below  our  Christian  experience  the  moral  intensity 
of  God  throbs  through  Jesus  Christ,  persisting  even 
amid  the  sins  that  deaden  the  soul  and  separate 
us  in  suspicion  and  disobedience  from  His  heart. 
"  In  all  eternity,"  wrote  Pusey  to  a  correspondent, 
"  we  can  never  love  God  enough  for  His  forgiving 
love.  I  suppose  that  one  of  our  feelings,  as  He 
unfolds  to  us  more  and  more  of  His  love,  will  be, 
'  This  for  me  !  '  " 

Thus  we  look  back  to  Jesus  Christ  for  the 
shining  proof  of  God's  serious  concern.  The 
reason  for  His  personality  and  mission  lies  in  the 
divine  grace.  His  life  reveals  the  greatness  of 
God's  love,  the  greatness  of  its  aim  as  well  as  the 
greatness  of  its  cost  and  care  in  raising  men  to 
the  spiritual  level.  Those  who  know  they  are 
forgiven,  and  how  they  have  been  forgiven,  are 
in  possession  of  a  conviction  which  assures  them 
of  Love  with  a  force  that  outstrips  all  other 
evidence  and  triumphs  over  any  doubt  and 
hesitation.    They  know  that  in  Christ  a  power  of 


THE   GREAT   LOVE   OF  GOD  27 

God  has  come  into  play  which  is  equal  to  the 
needs  of  man. 

But  this  disclosure  of  God's  lovingkindness  is 
not  isolated.     From  the  first  century  onwards  it 
has  been  unfolding  and  realizing  itself,  coming 
into  fuller  action  within  history  and  experience. 
The  life  of  Jesus  made  it  possible  for  the  divine 
love  to  express  itself  adequately,  and  as  time  has 
gone  on  God  has  enabled  men  to  see  more  than 
ever  of  what  lay  in  His  heart,  by  initiating  them 
gradually,  as  they  have  been  able  to  receive  it, 
into  the  intensity  and  treasures  of  His  affection. 
That   in    the  ages   to  come  he  might  shew   the 
exceeding  riches  of  his  grace  in  kindness  toward 
zts  in  Christ  Jesus.     Many  ages  have  come  and 
gone  since  these  words  were  written,  very  different 
ages  from  what  the  first  Christians  ever  antici- 
pated.    But  through  ages  of  faith  and  degenera- 
tion alike  the  story  of  the  Christian  experience, 
in  its  vital  forms,  has  been  a  steadily  broadening 
appreciation  of  God's  response  to  human  need. 
The  significance  of  the  person  of  Jesus  could  only 
be    grasped    in    its    influence    and    effects    upon 
mankind.     It  needed  time  to  bring  out  the  wealth 
and  resources  of  His  Spirit  for  the  world.     And 
throughout  the  ages  over  which  we  can  look  back 
it  is  possible  to  trace  upon  the  whole  a  deepening 
sense  of   the   grandeur  of   God's  love  in  Jesus 
Christ,  of  its  firmness  and  moral  discipline,  as 
well   as   of   its   consolations.     There   have  been 


28  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

phases  of  reaction  and  decline  in  Christianity, 
when  men  have  hesitated  to  take  God  at  His 
word.  There  have  been,  for  example,  doctrines 
of  the  atonement  which  have  become  a  dead  letter, 
mainly  because  they  failed,  for  all  their  logical 
consistency,  to  rouse  any  sense  of  adoration  and 
wonder  before  the  love  of  God.  But  even  when 
the  Christian  salvation  has  been  misinterpreted  or 
undervalued,  even  when  men  within  the  Church 
have  thought  more  of  their  own  efforts  than  of 
God's  free  gift,  and  spoken  as  if  the  Christian 
life  could  be  self-inspired  and  self-supported,  the 
evangelical  note  has  rung  out :  By  grace  you  are 
saved,  it  is  the  gift  of  God.  Forgotten  aspects  of 
Jesus  have  repeatedly  acquired  new  prominence 
through  the  devotion  and  insight  of  the  saints. 
Hamlet,  says  Prof.  Bradley,  "usually  speaks 
as  one  who  accepts  the  received  Christian  ideas, 
yet  when  he  meditates  profoundly  he  seems  to 
ignore  them."  There  has  been  too  much  of  this 
Hamlet-spirit  in  the  Church.  Yet  her  short- 
comings have  only  thrown  into  more  brilliant 
relief  the  quenchless  patience  of  God's  love,  and 
the  tenacity  of  His  revelation.  The  vital  truths 
of  the  faith  have  refused  to  be  ignored  for  long. 
It  has  been  a  revelation  to  the  world,  as  well  as 
to  the  Church  itself,  how  vital  and  undying  is  the 
sheer  grace  of  God  in  Christ,  often  thwarted,  often 
grieved,  but  never  chilled  by  human  imperfec- 
tions.    The  influence  of  atavism  has  been  strong. 


THE   GREAT   LOVE   OF  GOD  29 

But  against  this  almost  every  generation  has  felt 
the  stronger  influence  of  the  evangelical  passion 
for  grace  as  the  central  force  of  faith. 

This  ocean  which  stretches  into  the  far  horizon 
comes  up  to  our  very  feet.  The  resources  of  the 
sreat  love  of  God  enter  into  our  individual 
experience,  and  are  to  be  verified  there  as  well 
as  in  historical  retrospect.  We  are  saved  by  faith, 
not  by  works.  True,  but  we  are  saved  for  good 
works,  for  an  active  participation  in  God's 
interests,  for  sympathy  and  co-operation  with  the 
objects  of  His  love  on  earth.  The  grace  of  God 
is  not  only  the  power  which  makes  us  Christians 
at  all,  but  the  process  and  sphere  of  our  moral 
training.  We  meet  it  in  the  details  of  our  char- 
acter  and  conduct.  Redemption  involves  the 
creation  of  a  new  life  with  definite  duties  and 
interests  of  its  own.  For  we  are  his  workmanship, 
created  in  Christ  J esus  for  good  works,  which  God 
afore  -prepared  that  zve  should  walk  in  them.  A 
moral  personality,  controlled  by  the  spirit  of 
Christ,  is  at  once  the  outcome  and  the  evidence 
of  God's  activity  in  Christ. 

This  is  the  third  method  of  realizing  practically 
what  is  involved  in  the  great  love  of  God.  Love 
in  Him  as  in  our  fellow-men  invariably  tends  to 
produce  a  keener  life.  It  is  not  mere  fondness. 
It  means  moral  training  and  new  energy.  It 
heightens  every  vital  power,  and  intensifies  our 
faculties.     Those  will  realize  His  great  love  best 


3o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

who  find  themselves  inspired  by  it  to  take  a  firmer 
hold  of  their  tasks  and  to  understand  how  much 
richer  and  nobler  life  has  become  for  them  in  the 
light  of  His  redeeming  will,  with  its  impulse  to 
self-sacrifice.  If  love  determines  God's  relation 
to  us,  and  if  the  end  of  love  is  fellowship,  we  see 
how  the  divine  love,  as  expressed  in  Christianity, 
cannot  rest  satisfied  short  of  creating  human  per- 
sonalities which  answer  to  the  mind  and  purpose 
of  Christ.  Such  is  the  career  opened  for  the  faith 
of  man.  Each  of  us  has  a  vocation,  to  be  inspired 
by  the  enterprise  and  devotion  which  are  the 
breath  of  love.  The  vocation  lies  within  the 
setting  of  the  duties  and  demands  imposed  by  our 
special  sphere.  There  it  is,  and  not  in  any  moral 
vacuum,  that  a  revelation  of  His  love  awaits  the 
faithful  conscience.  Depend  upon  it,  if  our  sense 
of  that  love  is  growing  uncertain,  it  is  often  for 
no  other  reason  than  that  we  have  slipped  into 
the  habit  of  taking  our  duties  and  occupations 
idly  or  unthinkingly,  without  seeing  in  them  the 
precise  discipline  which  He  has  assigned  to  us. 
In  these  good  works  we  are  meant  to  express  and 
exercise  our  faith.  Take  them  in  the  spirit  of  a 
vocation,  and  they  witness  to  the  reality  of  God's 
will. 

"  Ah,  little  recks  the  labourer, 
How  near  his  work  is  holding  him  to  God, 
The  loving  Labourer  through  space  and  time." 

Our  consciousness  of  being  in  touch  with  God 


THE   GREAT   LOVE   OF   GOD  31 

would  be  deepened  if  we  would  only  recognize 
that  He  has  prepared  the  specific  enterprise  and 
exercise  of  duty  for  us,  and  is  prepared  to  meet 
us  face  to  face  upon  that  line.  Whatever  love 
may  be,  it  is  dutiful ;  it  assigns  duties  to  others, 
and  to  itself.  To  ignore  this  truth  is  to  miss  one 
of  the  dimensions  of  His  great  love.  To  accept 
it  is  to  reach  a  new  degree  of  cheerfulness  and 
effectiveness  in  our  service  of  God  and  man. 
More  than  that,  to  believe  we  are  His  workman- 
ship, here  because  we  are  needed  for  some  end  of 
His  own,  makes  us  aware  of  the  wonderful  pre- 
cision and  definiteness  with  which  God  uses  the 
details  of  our  individual  lives  to  draw  us  into  the 
destiny  of  our  tie  to  Jesus  Christ.  We  are  created 
in  Christ  Jesus  for  good  works.  They  are  not 
irrelevant  to  our  spiritual  career  any  more  than 
they  were  to  His.  If  we  understand  anything  of 
the  moral  energy  which  throbs  in  God's  redeem- 
ing purpose,  we  shall  grow  more  and  more 
conscious  that  our  duties  are  a  vocation,  and  that 
they  become  for  each  of  us  a  private  interpretation 
of  the  great  will  of  Love  with  its  design  and  its 
demands. 


IV 

SEEKING  AND  SOUGHT 


Behold,  a  greater    than  Jonah    is   here  .  .  .  behold,   a  greater 
than  Solomon  is  fare.— Matt.  xii.  41,  42. 


IV 

SEEKING  AND  SOUGHT 

The  phase,  "  the  claims  of  Jesus,"  is  not  very 
fortunate.  It  is  apt  to  call  up  associations  which 
are  totally  out  of  keeping  with  One  who  was  never 
obtrusive  or  intrusive  in  dealing  with  the  human 
conscience.  But  words  like  these  breathe  a  con- 
viction that  His  mission  was  final  and  critical,  in 
the  deepest  sense.  Jesus  was  conscious  that  all 
who  came  directly  into  contact  with  Him  had  a 
chance  such  as  no  previous  ages  had  enjoyed, 
even  within  the  history  of  Israel;  and  while  this 
offered  untold  opportunities  of  moral  growth,  it 
also  rendered  the  issues  of  life  exceptionally 
serious.  In  His  later  teaching,  especially,  He 
seems  to  have  laid  more  and  more  stress  upon 
the  responsibility  involved  in  such  an  opportunity 
as  His  contemporaries  possessed  of  entering  into 
His  revelation  of  God.  For  everything  comes 
back,  in  the  end,  to  men's  estimate  of  Him.  If 
Jesus  is  despised  and  rejected,  despising  always 
comes  first  in  the  order  of  experience;  outward 
rejection  is  invariably  the  result  of  some  inward 
depreciation. 

D2  35 


36  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

There  are  two  prominent  phases  or  types  of 
religious  experience,  by  means  of  which  the  real 
significance  of  Jesus  is  appreciated.  One  is 
marked  by  compunction,  the  other  by  curiosity — 
that  is,  by  curiosity  in  the  form  of  moral  reverence 
and  aspiration.  The  characteristic  note  of  the  one 
is  confession;  of  the  other,  quest.  In  Paul's 
phrase  Jesus  appears  to  some  temperaments  as 
God's  power  to  stir  repentance,  while  others,  of 
a  more  inquiring  nature,  find  it  congenial  to 
regard  Him  as  God's  wisdom.  These  are  not  to 
be  distinguished  as  emotional  and  intellectual 
phases  of  religion.  Repentance,  after  all,  is  a 
change  of  mind,  and  the  quest  for  God  has  its 
own  moments  of  compunction.  Penitence  is  a 
revelation  to  man,  of  God  and  of  himself,  just  as 
any  genuine  search  for  the  truth  of  this  life  im- 
plies a  break  now  and  then  with  prejudices  and  a 
struggle  with  selfish  habits.  But  we  may  roughly 
divide  men  and  women  according  as  the  note  of 
compunction  or  of  inquiry  predominates  in  them, 
owing  to  circumstances  or  training.  Some  are 
stirred  and  startled  by  what  seems  to  be  God 
breaking  into  their  experience  with  an  arresting 
appeal.  Others  conceive  Him  as  sought  rather 
than  seeking,  as  the  goal  rather  than  as  the 
goad  of  life;  they  are  at  first  more  conscious 
of  their  search  for  Him  than  of  His  search  for 
them.  But  the  point  is  that  both  are  methods  of 
coming   into   touch   with   One  whose   life   lends 


SEEKING   AND   SOUGHT  37 

reality  to  ours,  whether  we  are  conscious  of  Him 
as  besieging  our  reluctance  or  as  satisfying  our 
aspirations. 

Behold,  said  Jesus,  a  greater  than  Jonah  is  here. 
If  some  people  are  ever  to  be  religious,  it  would 
seem  as  though  they  required  to  be  roused  by 
some  private  or  public  thrust,  some  inroad,  as  it 
were,  of  God's  spirit  into  their  indifference.  Jesus 
appealed  to  the  old  story  of  Jonah  and  the 
Ninevites.  The  prophet  came,  with  a  shattering 
summons  to  moral  amendment,  to  the  swarming 
inhabitants  of  Nineveh;  he  burst  into  its  superb 
civilization  and  deep-rooted  traditions.  And  he 
succeeded  in  disturbing  the  complacency  of  the 
people.  The  men  of  Nineveh  did  re-pent  at  the 
preaching  of  Jonah. 

Christ  also  moves  against  the  careless  con- 
science. Through  His  spirit  God  is  constantly 
taking  the  initiative  in  order  to  bring  men  back  to 
right  relations  with  Himself,  disturbing  their  con- 
ventionality, and  rendering  them  uneasy.  Be- 
hold, a  greater  than  Jonah  is  here.  Jonah  came 
to  these  Ninevites  as  a  foreigner,  while  Jesus 
appears  as  one  of  ourselves.  His  work  on  the 
conscience  is  not  that  of  an  outsider,  shrewd  and 
critical,  but  of  one  who  entered  into  the  essence  of 
our  own  experience.  A  greater  than  Jonah  ?  Yes, 
for  while  Jonah  did  nothing  save  in  words  for 
Nineveh,  and  did  even  that  service  with  reluct- 
ance, Jesus  willingly  proved  His  personal  interest 


38  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

by  what  He  achieved  and  suffered  on  our  behalf. 
Through  the  crowded  bazars  of  the  Assyrian  city 
Jonah  swept  with  his  piercing  cry,  Repent;  but 
no  man  was  thrilled  to  lay  down  life  at  his  feet 
for  service,  no  woman  sobbed  out  her  despair  and 
love  before  him,  and  no  child  was  ever  lifted  to 
his  arms.  Stern  and  aloof,  with  "  the  loud  cry  of 
one  who  sees  to  one  who  sins,"  the  prophet  did  his 
work.  Great  work?  Yes,  but  not  the  greatest. 
He  who  is  greater  than  Jonah  had  incomparably 
deeper  ways  of  starting  the  rush  of  forgiveness 
which  lifts  life  beyond  complacency  and  despair. 
He  knew  how  and  when  to  touch  those  deep 
springs  of  feeling  which  well  up  to  the  saving  of 
the  soul.  We  are  sometimes  suspicious  of  appeals 
to  feeling  in  religion,  and  our  suspicions  are  not 
always  unfounded.  But  the  movement  of  the 
heart  has  its  place  in  Christianity.  The  dread 
of  emotion  and  the  waste  of  emotion,  which  is 
more  ominous  in  life  ?  The  latter,  perhaps.  Stilly 
the  former  means  that  the  soul  is  often  starved. 
It  is  an  error,  this  fear  of  being  strongly  moved 
either  to  contrition  or  to  shame.  There  are  cases 
in  which  no  influence  can  so  wisely  bear  upon  our 
ways  of  evading  any  thought  of  God  and  of 
resisting  the  warnings  of  conscience,  as  the  spirit 
of  Him  who,  whatever  traditions  fail  or  creeds 
lose  their  moral  power,  moves  in  our  midst,  and 
as  He  moves,  wakens  the  unreflecting,  sometimes 
by  tenderness,  sometimes  by  the  very  mercy  of 


SEEKING   AND   SOUGHT  39 

fear,  to  a  sense  of  the  honour  and  possibilities  that 
lie  within  their  lives. 

Once  again,  Jesus  has  an  incomparable  attrac- 
tion for  those  who,  by  training  or  disposition,  are 
more  active  and  energetic  in  their  religious  life. 
He  quotes  the  story  of  the  Arabian  queen,  which 
had  so  deeply  impressed  the  Oriental  mind.  She 
came  from  the  ends  of  the  earth  to  hear  the  wis- 
dom of  Solomon.  Foreigner  though  she  was,  the 
Queen  of  Sheba  sought  out  the  Jewish  monarch, 
at  any  cost.  She  came  .  .  .  And  behold,  a  greater 
than  Solomon  is  here. 

The  point  of  the  story  is  appreciation.  Appre- 
ciation involves  effort;  life  must  be  set  in  motion 
by  a  deliberate  exercise  of  mind  and  will.  She 
came  from  the  ends  of  the  earth  to  hear  the 
wisdom  of  Solomon.  It  is  never  enough  to  live 
among  the  echoes  of  the  religious  world,  or  to 
content  oneself  with  hearing  of  Jesus  at  second- 
hand. The  essential  condition  for  appreciating 
His  wisdom  for  life  is  to  come  into  touch  with 
His  personality,  by  that  output  of  the  sincere  life 
which  will  face  anything  in  order  to  arrive  at  the 
exact  truth  about  God  and  itself.  This,  again, 
involves  humility.  We  must  come,  not  to  patron- 
ize or  criticize,  but  to  learn.  Otherwise  our  quest 
will  never  lead  us  beyond  the  early,  shallow 
certainties  that  check  our  growth.  But  to  nerve 
the  soul  for  its  enterprise,  and  sustain  it  in  its 
zeal,  Jesus  promises  entire  success.     A  greater 


4o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

than  Solomon  is  here — here,  in  the  world  of  our 
hopes  and  aspirations.  These  stirrings  of  our 
nature  are  not  exotic.  The  intuitions  of  trust  and 
holiness,  the  faculties  of  moral  desire  and  rever- 
ence, the  instinct  of  prayer,  these  correspond  with 
the  spirit  of  Christ.  He  is  at  once  their  sanction 
and  their  satisfaction.  He  pledges  Himself  to 
meet  our  genuine  quest  for  the  truth  of  God. 
Whoever  fails,  He  will  be  at  the  place  of  wisdom 
and  moral  vision.  His  personality  evokes  and 
answers  our  religious  need. 

It  is  not  superfluous  to  recall  this  wonderful 
consciousness  of  finality.  For  the  authority  of 
Jesus  has  been  challenged  even  by  some  whose 
ardour  in  the  quest  for  light  and  truth  has  not 
abated.  "  I  look  upon  Christ,"  said  Frederic 
Myers,  "  as  a  Revealer  of  Immortality  absolutely 
unique,  as  the  incomparable  Pioneer  of  all  Wis- 
dom that  shall  be  learned  concerning  unseen 
things.  But,  like  the  Norseman's  discovery  of 
America,  his  work  grows  more  and  more  remote, 
and  there  are  no  sure  sea-marks  for  others  to 
follow  along  that  legendary  way.  A  new  dis- 
covery is  needed — to  be  made  by  no  single 
Columbus,  but  by  the  whole  set  and  strain  of 
humanity."  Were  this  true,  it  would  mean  that 
the  Jesus  who  felt  Himself  to  be  greater  than  any 
previous  revelation  of  God,  had  now  succeeded 
in  training  humanity  to  be  greater  than  Himself, 
by  producing  a  moral  sensitiveness  which  could 


SEEKING   AND   SOUGHT  41 

afford  to  dispense  with  the  historical  witness  of 
His  Spirit.  It  would  imply,  as  the  Mohammedan 
sages  claim,  that  His  place  in  the  world's  history 
is  provisional,  not  final.  From  the  gathered 
resources  of  our  race  we  should  be  encouraged  to 
draw  strength  and  guidance  for  the  moral  and 
the  spiritual  problems  of  the  future.  Believe  it 
who  can,  we  cannot.  We  may  know  too  little  of 
Him,  considering  our  length  and  wealth  of  oppor- 
tunities, but  we  know  Him  better  than  to  dream 
that  He  has  been  superseded  in  the  leadership  of 
men,  in  the  work  of  recovering  the  soul  from  its 
disloyalty  or  of  discovering  to  it  the  reaches  of 
its  growth  into  God's  purpose.  Nothing  could  be 
less  promising  than  a  religious  movement  whose 
motto  is  A  greater  than  Jesus.  He  stands  to  us 
for  a  God  who  seeks,  for  a  God  who  can  be  sought 
and  found.  Alike  in  our  moments  of  compunction 
and  of  aspiration,  we  can  verify  His  power  of 
moving  the  cold  heart  and  of  satisfying  our 
awakened  instincts  of  purity  and  truth.  He  can 
do  this  as  none  else  can.  And  for  that  reason  we 
also  repent  when  He  comes  to  us;  we  also  come 
to  hear  His  wisdom  as  the  last  word  on  our  lives. 


THE  BALCONY   VIEW  OF  LIFE 


Oh  that  1  haa  in  the  wilderness  a  lodging  place  oj  wayfaring 
men  j  that  I  ?night  leave  my  people \  and  go  from  them. — Jer.  ix.  2. 


V 

THE  BALCONY   VIEW  OF  LIFE 

Pythagoras  was  once  asked  contemptuously 
by  a  Greek  tyrant  who  he  was  and  what  was  his 
particular  business  in  the  world.  The  philosopher 
replied  that  at  the  Olympic  games  some  people 
came  to  try  for  the  prizes,  some  to  dispose  of  their 
merchandise,  some  to  enjoy  themselves  and  meet 
their  friends,  and  some  to  look  on.  "  I,"  said 
Pythagoras,  "  am  one  of  those  who  come  to  look 
on  at  life."  Bacon,  in  telling  the  story,  adds  : 
"  But  men  must  know  that  in  this  theatre  of 
man's  life  it  is  reserved  only  for  God  and  angels 
to  be  lookers-on." 

There  are  moments  and  moods  when  even  a 
strong  nature  will  feel  tempted  to  escape,  or  to 
wish  to  escape,  from  the  pressure  of  responsibility 
into  a  position  where  it  would  only  be  necessary  to 
look  on.  Such  was  Jeremiah's  case  at  this  period 
of  his  career.  He  felt  disappointed  and  dis- 
quieted with  his  age.  He  was  at  that  critical 
phase  of  life  when  the  first  flush  of  enthusiasm, 
which  throws  men  into  eager  contact  with  their 
fellows,  has  been  succeeded  by  a  profound  sense 

45 


46  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

of  the  corruption  and  self-will  and  greed  which 
sometimes  thwart  an  enterprise  of  religious  or 
national  reform.  He  had  failed  to  carry  the 
people  with  him;  he  was  unpopular;  and  he  was 
disheartened.  At  one  moment  he  was  ready  to 
weep  for  his  land.  Oh  that  my  head  were  waters, 
and  mine  eyes  a  fountain  of  tears,  that  I  might 
weep  day  and  night  for  the  slain  of  the  daughter 
of  my  people  !  That  is  the  anguish  of  a  true 
patriot  over  evils  which  are  being  allowed  to  eat 
away  the  heart  of  a  nation,  over  the  rampant 
selfishness  which  forgets  the  rights  and  claims  of 
God  or  of  one's  fellow-men,  over  the  indifference 
of  people  to  human  pain  and  to  divine  appeals. 
But  sensitive  natures  pass  rapidly  from  pathos  to 
irritation.  Another  mood  now  seizes  Jeremiah. 
He  longs  to  get  away  from  the  whole  business. 
Oh  that  I  had  in  the  wilderness  a  lodging  place 
of  wayfaring  men;  that  I  might  leave  my  people, 
and  go  from  them !  Now  what  does  that  cry 
mean?  Not  simply  the  craving  to  escape  from 
the  sordid  ingratitude  and  intrigues  of  men  into 
"  God's  free  air  and  hope  of  better  things."  Not 
simply  the  longing  to  exchange  social  treachery 
and  the  unrealities  of  the  religious  world  for 
nature's  lonely,  stedfast  face  in  earth  and  sky,  to 
hear  nothing  but  the  wind  on  the  prairie  and  in 
the  glens.  Jeremiah  does  voice  this  disgust  of  a 
high-minded  soul  with  the  vices  of  a  corrupt 
civilization,  but  his  main  thought  is  to  be  quit  of 


THE  BALCONY  VIEW  OF   LIFE  47 

responsibilities.  He  yearns  for  a  lodging  place 
of  wayfaring  men.  Not,  mark  you,  for  a  hermit's 
lonely  cottage,  nor  for  some  hut  of  a  recluse 
beside  the  Dead  Sea,  but  for  a  khan  or  caravan- 
serai. The  trade-routes  had  such  places  dotted 
along  their  course,  where  travellers  and  traders 
could  put  up  for  the  night.  The  caravanserai 
was  often  a  busy  place,  for  all  its  cheerless  fur- 
nishing; there  would  be  men  coming  and  going, 
hurrying  on  their  pleasure  or  their  business, 
merchants,  court-officials,  or  ordinary  travellers, 
full  of  news  and  alive  with  interests  of  every  kind. 
There,  thought  Jeremiah,  I  could  feel  at  home;  I 
could  content  myself  with  letting  things  go 
unchallenged.  He  wanted  evidently  to  be  no 
more  than  a  looker-on  at  life.  He  was  tired  not 
so  much  of  human  beings  as  of  responsibility  for 
any  of  them.  Out  on  the  steppes,  in  a  khan,  he 
could  still  keep  in  touch  with  some  currents  of 
existence,  and  yet  be  no  more  than  a  cool, 
indifferent  spectator. 

Jeremiah  is  far  from  us  in  time,  but  this  morbid 
craving  for  the  balcony  view  of  life  is  not 
unknown  to  modern  life.  In  a  foreign  hotel  we  can 
sit  on  the  verandah,  watching  the  play  and  move- 
ment of  human  nature  with  a  refreshing  sense  of 
personal  detachment.  These  people  are  no  special 
concern  of  ours.  We  can  laugh  at  them  or  with 
them,  free  from  any  feeling  of  responsibility  for 
their  doings.  We  are  simply  lookers-on  for  the  time 


48  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

being,  and  the  sight  of  human  foibles  interests  us 
without  stirring  an  atom  of  serious  obligation.  We 
are  nothing  to  these  people,  and  they  are  nothing 
to  us.  Were  we  at  home,  it  would  be  a  different 
matter ;  but  here  we  are  not  among  our  own  people, 
and  consequently  we  can  afford  to  play  the  role 
of  outside  critics,  who  do  not  feel  bound  to  inter- 
fere with  any  behaviour  they  may  witness.  The 
sight  of  these  people  stirs  no  uneasy  sense  that  we 
should  rouse  ourselves  to  action. 

This  corresponds  to  a  mood  which  sometimes 
comes  over  us,  a  mood  of  dissatisfaction  in  which 
we  would  do  almost  anything  to  throw  off  our 
responsibilities  for  others  in  the  home,  the  Church, 
or  the  State.  We  feel  this  whenever  stupidity  and 
selfishness  get  on  our  nerves,  and  when  we  think 
we  cannot  stand  the  strain  any  longer  or  be  of  any 
use  to  our  immediate  circle.  Sometimes  we  can 
carry  out  our  wishes.  We  can  resign  and  with- 
draw from  certain  lines  of  service,  if  things  do 
not  go  exactly  as  we  wanted.  But  in  many  cases 
where  we  cannot  alter  our  situation,  the  craving 
smoulders  in  the  soul,  and  makes  us  cynical  and 
superior,  as  if  we  had  the  right  to  be  scornfully 
indifferent  to  the  whole  business.  It  was  not  so 
with  Jeremiah.  His  petulant  irritation  was  only 
a  passing  mood.  He  recovered  from  it,  as  he 
realized  after  a  while  that  God  meant  him  to  live 
among  his  kith  and  kin,  suffering  with  them  and 
for  them  as  well  as  at  their  hands.     In  a  passion 


THE   BALCONY  VIEW   OF   LIFE  49 

of  despair  he  broke  out  with  the  cry,  Oh  that  I 
might  leave  my  feofile  !  But  he  did  not  leave 
them.  He  was  too  noble  and  generous  at  heart 
to  become  a  mere  looker-on.  For  this  craving  is 
a  moral  weakness.  The  heroic  natures  in  every 
age  are  not  seated  on  the  balcony ;  they  are  down 
among  their  fellow-men,  bearing  the  strain  and 
stress  of  their  position,  identifying  themselves 
willingly  with  the  people  among  whom  it  may 
have  pleased  God  to  cast  their  lot,  and  brave 
enough  to  meet 

"The  fierce  confederate  storm 
Of  sorrow,  barricaded  evermore 
Within  the  walls  of  cities." 

This  heroic  identification  of  himself  with  the 
interests  of  a  faulty  people  marks  out  Jeremiah  as 
a  prototype  of  Jesus.  When  our  Lord  was  on 
earth,  some  of  His  contemporaries  were  reminded 
of  Jeremiah.  Whom  do  men  say  that  I  am  ? 
Some  say,  Jeremiah.  Why,  we  are  not  told.  But 
for  us  Jesus  resembles  Jeremiah  in  this  at  least, 
that  He  did  identify  Himself,  though  in  a  far 
deeper  degree,  with  the  interests  of  a  self-willed 
and  rebellious  people.  He,  too,  shared  their 
reproach  and  put  up  with  their  misunderstandings 
and  ingratitude,  in  order  to  carry  out  God's 
purpose.  He,  too,  had  to  meet  and  master  the 
temptation  to  decline  further  association  with  their 
unfaithfulness.    O  faithless  and  perverse  genera- 


50  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

tiony  He  once  broke  out,  how  long  shall  I  be  with 
you  and  bear  with  you !  There  were  moments 
when  the  incredulity  and  obstinacy  of  men  were 
almost  too  much  even  for  His  great  patience. 
But  He  triumphed  over  all  such  inclinations  to 
disavow  responsibility  for  His  race.  "  Men  must 
know  that  in  this  theatre  of  man's  life  it  is 
reserved  only  for  God  and  angels  to  be  lookers- 
on."  Must  they?  Can  they  not  win  a  better 
knowledge  from  the  revelation  of  our  Lord? 
What  does  His  life  mean  but  that  we  have  a  God 
who  is  not  content  to  be  a  looker-on,  a  God  who 
identifies  Himself  to  the  uttermost  with  our 
eternal  interests,  a  God  who,  instead  of  being  our 
judge  at  the  end  and  meantime  the  watcher  of  our 
little,  foolish  ways,  enters  into  the  heart  of  our 
struggle  through  Him  who  came  to  bear  our  sins 
and  carry  our  sorrows?  This  is  the  gospel  we 
receive  from  One  who  reminded  men  of  Jeremiah 
— not  of  the  Jeremiah  who  once  longed  to  cast 
off  his  responsibilities,  but  of  the  greater  Jeremiah 
who  went  back  heroically  to  share  his  people's  lot. 
It  is  a  gospel  which  forbids  us  to  content  our- 
selves, on  any  pretext,  with  looking  on.  The 
temptation  of  the  balcony  view  of  life  is  extra- 
ordinarily subtle.  It  appeals  to  our  pride,  to  our 
sense  of  wounded  dignity,  and  to  our  instincts  of 
superiority,  as  well  as  to  the  mere  love  of  ease. 
But  it  is  beneath  us.  If,  dispirited  and  disgusted, 
we  do  leave  our  people,  thinking  that  we  cannot 


THE   BALCONY  VIEW  OF   LIFE  51 

reasonably  be  expected  to  do  any  more  for  such 
a  mean  and  thankless  generation,  we  are  leaving 
the  spirit  of  Christ  behind  us.  That  spirit  sends 
us  back  to  the  old  duties  with  their  irritation  and 
their  pressure.  For  it  is  inside  these,  not  outside, 
that  we  can  keep  in  touch  with  the  presence  of 
our  Lord. 

It  is  a  gospel,  also,  which  forbids  any  despair 
of  ourselves.  After  what  Jesus  has  done  and 
suffered  on  our  behalf,  we  never  can  suspect  that 
God  will  leave  His  people,  as  if  He  could  no 
longer  bear  to  have  any  part  or  lot  in  their 
ungracious  lives.  Christ  is  still  one  with  our  race 
in  the  redeeming  purpose  of  the  Father.  He  does 
not  hold  aloof.  He  is  no  looker-on  at  the  little 
tragedies  and  comedies  of  our  existence.  He  has 
made  Himself  responsible  for  us;  that  is  the 
strength  and  wonder  of  His  gospel.  He  will  not 
lose  His  interest  in  us,  despite  the  errors  and  the 
emptiness  of  our  days.  He  at  least  will  never 
leave  His  people,  such  is  the  strong  love  and  the 
longsuffering  of  His  heart  towards  us. 


e  2 


VI 

A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB 


Jesus  answered  and  said  unto  her,  If  thou  knewest  the  gift  of 
God,  and  who  it  is  that  saith  to  thee,  Give  me  to  drink;  thou  wouldest 
have  asked  of  him,  and  he  would  have  given  thee  living  water. 

John  iv.  10. 


VI 

A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB 

If  thou  kitewest.  But  the  woman  of  Samaria 
did  not  know.  She  failed  as  yet  to  realize  her 
opportunity.  She  was  on  the  edge  of  the  supreme 
moment  in  her  life,  and  apparently  she  could 
find  nothing  better  to  do  than  talk  and  tease,  until 
it  seemed  as  though  she  would  actually  allow 
the  chance  to  pass,  oblivious  of  its  size  and  offer. 
For,  as  not  unfrequently  is  the  case  in  human 
experience,  the  turning-point  came  unawares. 
Nothing  warned  this  woman  of  the  significance 
which  attached  to  the  conversation  or  of  the 
momentous  possibilities  with  which  she  was 
trifling  in  her  interview  with  Jesus.  She  had  no 
presentiment,  inward  or  outward,  of  the  crisis. 
The  sunlight  flickering  on  the  sand,  the  stones  and 
water  of  the  well,  the  common  sights  and  sounds 
of  the  place,  were  as  they  had  been  on  countless 
other  days,  and  she  herself  had  probably  trudged 
out  with  her  pitcher  in  that  listless  mood  which 
renders  people  too  dull  to  expect  any  fresh 
experience  or  any  vital  change. 

//  thou  knewest.     The  keen  sense  of  capacity 

55 


56  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

and  aspiration  may  readily  fade  out  of  the 
religious  life.  Any  thought  of  a  God  who  is 
actually  moving  and  speaking,  or  breaking  into 
the  circle  of  experience,  is  practically  as  foreign 
to  some  people  as  it  was  to  this  woman.  And 
sometimes  for  much  the  same  reason.  The  trouble 
is  that  they  stand  upon  a  level  where  religion  is 
viewed  mainly  in  the  past  or  in  the  future,  rather 
than  as  a  force  and  factor  in  the  realities  of 
to-day.  Our  father  Jacob,  she  exclaimed;  and 
then,  when  Messiah  cometh.  As  if  religion  could 
be  resolved  into  historical  traditions  or  apocalyptic 
hopes  !  She  could  talk  glibly  about  both,  but  the 
single  point  of  connection  between  her  and 
contemporary  religion  evidently  lay  in  religious 
controversies,  upon  which  she  spoke  freely  and 
sarcastically,  under  the  influence  of  the  same 
delusion  which  leads  people  to  imagine  they 
understand  Christianity  when  they  toss  words  in 
print  or  conversation  upon  religion  and  the 
Churches.  Any  notion  of  God's  living  presence 
or  of  His  personal  interest  in  herself  had  appar- 
ently ebbed  out  of  her  .mind.  She  no  longer 
expected  anything  immediate  or  great  at  the  hand 
of  God. 

"  I  do  not  wonder,"  said  Ruskin,  "  at  what  men 
suffer;  but  I  wonder  often  at  what  they  lose." 
They  often  suffer  through  what  they  lose,  and, 
in  religion  especially,  they  often  lose  through  their 
insensibility  to  God's  power  and  grace  of  taking 


A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB  57 

the  initiative.  Many  people,  like  this  woman, 
find  it  extremely  hard  to  believe  in  God's  gener- 
osity and  spontaneity.  //  thou  knew  est  the  free 
gift  of  God.  Why  do  we  not  know  it  better? 
Perhaps  because  we,  too,  have  allowed  ourselves 
to  become  gradually  absorbed  in  the  sectarian 
animosities  and  vendettas  of  the  religious  world, 
so  that  the  thought  of  an  untrammelled  boon  for 
all  tends  to  drop  even  out  of  our  conception  of 
God.  Or,  because  our  very  sense  of  the  need  for 
personal  effort  has  led  us  to  exaggerate  the  func- 
tions of  the  human  will  in  faith.  Or  again,  because 
there  may  be  some  difficulty  about  a  hearty  belief 
in  God's  liberality  and  generosity.  Paradoxical 
as  it  may  seem,  that  belief  has  seldom  been  easy 
for  human  nature.  It  takes  God  to  convince  men 
of  His  spontaneous  love.  Primitive  paganism, 
for  example,  was  haunted  by  incurable  suspicions 
of  the  gods.  It  is  pathetic  to  notice  the  deliberate 
emphasis  with  which  ancient  legends  will  explain 
how  comforts  like  fire  and  so  forth  had  to  be 
stolen  or  extorted  from  reluctant  deities.  Nothing, 
we  may  say,  was  further  from  the  average  pagan 
mind  than  the  conception  of  a  god  who  freely 
benefited  men,  or  of  one  whose  favour  had  not  to 
be  won  by  force  or  fraud.  Survivals  of  this  pagan 
spirit  cling  to  human  nature  still.  They  reappear 
unconsciously  in  people  who  tacitly  assume,  in 
practice  if  not  in  theory,  that  the  initiative  in 
religion  rests  with  men  rather  than  with  God. 


58  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

"Think  you  'mid  all  this  mighty  sum 
Of  things  for  ever  speaking, 
That  nothing  of  itself  will  come, 
But  we  must  still  be  seeking  ?  " 

Wordsworth's   verse   of   remonstrance   might  be 
applied    not    unfairly    to    many    people    in    the 
Christian  world.     To  how  many,  it  must  be  con- 
fessed, a  God  who  may  be  found  is  really  more 
credible  than  One  who  finds?    How  often  a  God 
who  may  be  worshipped  seems  more  intelligible 
than    One    who    actually   seeks    zvorshippers    to 
worship  Him  f     Even  upon  a  well-trained  Chris- 
tian   belief,    is    it    not    occasionally    a   strain   to 
preserve  the  simple  confidence  in  a  God  who  acts 
upon  us  and  for  us  freely,  in  One  who  is  not  only 
a  welcoming  Father  but  a  Redeemer  who  comes 
to  seek  and  save  the  lost,  in  One  who  has  access 
to  us  in  ways  beyond  our  consciousness?     If  we 
know  life  we  can  hardly  deny  this.     It  springs  in 
many  cases  from  our  private  experience  of  injury 
or  neglect  at  the  hands  of  our  fellow-creatures. 
People,  like  this  Samaritan  woman,  may  start  life 
with  generous  hopes  and  trustful  affections  which 
are  rudely  beaten  down  as  advantage  is  taken  by 
others  of  their  good-nature ;  the  result  is  that  they 
learn  to  be  suspicious  of  their  neighbours,  until 
frankness  and  graciousness  ebb  out  of  their  rela- 
tionships.   They  dole  out  gifts,  as  this  woman 
doled  out  her  tardy  boon  of  water  to  the  thirsty 
Jesus,  perpetually  on  their  guard  against  being 


A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB  59 

taken  in  or  imposed  upon.  They  even  distrust 
any  lavish  profession  of  good-will.  In  the 
simplest  offer  no  less  than  in  the  most  ordinary 
request  they  suspect  ulterior  designs.  And  the 
further  mischief  and  misery  is  that  this  spirit 
reacts  upon  our  conception  of  God,  till  a  certain 
reluctance  is  associated  with  Him,  as  though  He, 
too,  bargained  somehow  with  men,  instead  of  seek- 
ing their  good  ungrudgingly;  we  behave  as  though 
His  demands  were  no  more  straightforward  than 
His  offers  were  disinterested. 

Jesus  meets  this  temper  by  revealing  His  own 
personality.  //  thou  knewest  the  gift  of  God,  and 
who  it  is  that  is  speaking  to  thee.  The  free  gift 
of  God  is  simply  God  giving  and  giving  of  Him- 
self in  Jesus.  God  spared  not  His  Son,  and  the 
Son  spared  not  Himself,  to  make  the  gift  real  to 
men.  Only,  as  none  of  the  higher  gifts  can  be 
received  without  some  sensitiveness  or  capacity 
in  the  receiver — for  an  influence  is  not  received 
like  a  flower  or  a  coin — the  preliminary  task  of 
God  is  to  stir  in  men,  as  in  this  puzzled,  heedless 
woman,  those  feelings  of  uneasiness  and  wist- 
fulness  which  are  the  earliest  symptoms  of  a 
diviner  change.  Such  is  the  process  of  our 
discipline.  It  is  the  spirit  of  Jesus  which  thus 
renders  us  imcomfortable  and  disturbs  our  lower 
satisfaction.  Jesus  and  this  woman  met  that 
afternoon.  Then  cometh  he  ...  to  the  well. 
There  cometh  a  woman  of  Samaria  to  draw  water. 


6o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

But  His  thirst  for  her  awoke  before  her  thirst 
for  Him,  and  that  proved  the  saving  of  her.  He 
was  a  stranger  to  her,  but  she  soon  discovered 
that  her  life  was  neither  strange  nor  indifferent 
to  Him.  In  the  last  resort  everything  goes  back 
to  that,  to  a  faith  in  God's  generosity  and  insight, 
excited  and  justified  by  the  impression  which 
the  life  and  spirit  of  Jesus  make  upon  our 
individual  lives.  As  soon  as  a  human  soul  has 
any  vital  sense  of  that,  he  asks  and  never  asks 
in  vain  for  help.  To  be  understood  and  trusted 
by  a  single  human  being  may  often  prove  the 
beginning  of  moral  redemption  for  blunted  and 
lowered  lives.  And  who  can  set  limits  to  the 
regenerating  power  of  a  belief  that  God  has  still 
interest  and  confidence  in  us?  Men  are  justified 
by  God's  faith  in  them  as  well  as  by  their  faith 
in  Him.  They  awaken  at  times  to  find  them- 
selves believing  in  Him,  clinging  desperately  to 
hope  and  goodness,  in  spite  of  their  unpromising 
past  and  their  as  unpromising  present,  because 
He  generously  believes  in  them.  Jesus  is  their 
living  proof  of  this  undeserved  and  unchanging 
love  in  God.  He  assures  them  that  man's  life 
with  God  is  larger  than  the  struggle  of  the  soul 
to  reach  and  persuade  God  of  its  great  need. 
My  soul  followeth  hard  after  thee.  In  the  order 
of  experience  we  are  often  conscious  of  our  own 
efforts,  of  our  prayers  and  aspirations,  first  of  all. 
But  we  soon  learn  what  underlies  these  mental 


A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB  61 

and  moral  struggles;  we  add,  Thy  right  hand 
ufholdeth  me.  It  is  God's  personal  touch  which 
sustains  us  even  in  our  most  spontaneous  and 
instinctive  moments.  And  how  much  more  in  our 
apathy,  when  it  stirs  the  conscience !  What 
though  we  have  felt  the  heartlessness  of  other 
people,  the  moral  emptiness  that  follows  self- 
indulgence,  or  the  drudgery  and  vicissitudes  of 
life  ?  What  though  we  are  prejudiced  and  ignorant 
and  shallow?  What  of  all  that,  when  under  our 
vain  and  vacant  moods,  beneath  the  rubbish  of 
trivial  interests  and  vulgar  circumstances,  Christ 
is  here  to  stir,  in  our  bewildered  and  stained 
characters,  a  fountain  of  fresh  hope  towards  God  ? 
He  gets  behind  our  evasions  and  levity  for 
nothing  else.  He  works  on  us  with  the  tact 
and  patience  of  love  for  that  very  purpose  of 
moral  regeneration. 

Now,  to  realize  this  is  the  pivot  on  which  every- 
thing may  turn.  //  thou  knewest !  This  woman 
came  to  know  it.  Our  father  Jacob,  she  said,  and 
she  was  a  truer  daughter  of  Jacob  than  she  under- 
stood. As  her  ancestor  once  awoke  in  a  strange 
place  to  find  God  had  been  beside  him,  though  he 
knew  it  not,  so,  centuries  later,  did  this  woman  of 
Sychar  realize  the  presence  of  Christ  with  a  start 
of  wonder.  And  so,  centuries  later  still,  do  we. 
On  us,  as  on  her,  life's  revelations  often  surge 
along  some  ordinary,  simple  channel,  unexpect- 
edly.    Most  people  are  familiar  with  the  experi- 


62  REASONS  AND   REASONS 

ence  of  being  disappointed  over  some  notable 
place  or  person.  The  visit  is  made  with  keen 
anticipation,  yet  some  will  return  pretty  much  as 
they  went,  curiously  unmoved,  ready  perhaps  to 
blame  themselves  or  other  people  for  the  failure 
of  their  high  hopes.  The  event  has  failed  to 
come  up  to  what  they  were  led  to  expect.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  equally  a  truth  and  law  of 
experience  that  some  of  the  most  regenerating 
impulses  and  the  noblest  influences  which  touch 
our  life  to  finer  issues  reach  us  through  the  door 
of  what  is  mechanical  or  casual. 

"God  comes  to  us 
With  every  day,  with  every  star  that  rises  ; 
In  every  moment  dwells  the  Righteous, 
And  starts  upon  the  soul  with  sweet  surprises." 

Such  moments  vary  in  their  intensity,  but  they  all 
contribute  to  that  heightening  of  our  sense  of 
personal  value  which  is  tantamount  in  the  religious 
sphere  to  a  keener  sense  of  the  divine  presence  in 
us  and  with  us.  Often  it  is  the  change  from  a 
conventional  and  vague  expectation  to  a  definite 
experience  of  one  who  has  searched  and  known 
us,  from  When  Messiah  comes  he  will  tell  us  all 
things  to  See  a  man  who  told  me  all  things  that 
ever  I  did.  Strangely  and  suddenly,  through  a 
conversation,  or  a  reverie  in  some  glen  or  lane, 
through  a  phrase  of  music,  a  text  of  scripture,  a 
sentence  in  some  book,  God  visits  us  as  He  visited 


A   DAUGHTER   OF  JACOB  63 

our  sister  at  Samaria  with  a  noiseless,  arresting 
experience,  a  reaction  against  our  lower  self,  a 
sudden  flash  revealing  new  possibilities,  a  disturb- 
ance of  our  languor  and  prejudices;  in  a  moment 
life  seems  to  fall  apart,  leaving  us  face  to  face 
with  a  Presence  that  will  not  be  put  by ;  the  inertia 
of  things  is  broken  up;  the  meaning  of  Jesus 
starts  up  through  the  letters  of  our  commonplace 
religion ;  through  some  casual  and  ordinary  event, 
as  it  were,  the  presence  of  the  living  God  becomes 
real  and  near  and  dear  to  us,  and  we  go  back  to 
life  from  these  pregnant,  precious  moments,  with 
something — something  intimate  and  holy  that 
makes  the  world  a  new  place  to  us  ever  afterwards. 
Like  this  daughter  of  Jacob  we  learn  that  no 
failures  in  the  past  need  disqualify  us  for  such  an 
experience  of  God's  power  in  Jesus.  Such  is  the 
wonder  and  wealth  of  human  life,  as  it  lies  beset 
by  God  in  Christ,  that  none  of  us  forfeits  entirely 
the  chance  of  coming  thus  face  to  face  with  His 
appeal,  and  none  is  beyond  the  reach  of  Him 
who  stoops  to  win  men  from  their  shallowness  and 
apathy,  who  is  here  to  give  them  heaven  on  earth, 
and  give  it  for  the  asking. 


VII 

HOW  GOD  IS  PAID 


The  centurion  answered  and  said.  Lord,  I  am  not  worthy  that 
thou  shou/dest  come  under  my  roof. — Matt.  viii.  8. 


VII 
HOW  GOD  IS  PAID 

He  was,  we  should  have  said,  a  most  deserving 
man.  His  Jewish  neighbours  gave  him,  of  their 
own  accord,  a  certificate  for  friendliness  and 
generosity,  as  well  as  for  religious  tolerance.  He 
is  worthy,  they  protested,  that  thou  shouldest  do 
this  for  him:  for  he  loveth  our  nation,  and  him- 
self built  our  synagogue.  No  man,  in  their  judg- 
ment, could  have  a  stronger  claim  on  the  good 
offices  of  the  Jewish  prophet,  especially  as  his 
request  was  unselfish.  It  confirms  the  impression 
of  this  officer's  excellent  character,  to  find  that 
he  was  interested  in  his  servant's  health.  My 
servant  lieth  at  home  sick. 

Nevertheless,  he  felt  himself  unworthy.  Luke 
tells  us  that  in  his  diffidence  he  actually  got  the 
local  elders  to  plead  for  him,  and,  when  Jesus 
moved  in  his  direction,  his  modesty  shrank  from 
the  thought  of  troubling  the  great  prophet  any 
further.  Lord,  his  message  ran,  trouble  not 
thyself :  for  I  am  not  worthy  that  thou  shouldest 
come  under  my  roof :  wherefore  neither  thought  I 
f  2  67 


68  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

myself  worthy  to  come  to  thee;  only  say  the  word, 
and  my  servant  shall  be  healed. 

This  was  no  formula  of  Oriental  courtesy. 
Still  less  was  it  an  expression  of  false  modesty. 
The  officer  betrays  neither  self-complacency  nor 
affectation;  he  does  not  fall  into  the  self-deprecia- 
tion which  is  really  another  form  of  egotism. 
What  he  sincerely  felt,  owing  to  the  impression 
made  upon  him  by  Jesus,  was  that  his  popularity 
gave  him  no  title  to  make  undue  claims  upon  the 
Lord. 

This  feeling  is  the  evidence  of  a  sound  nature. 
Popular  esteem  rests  upon  the  recognition  of 
merit.  It  is  on  the  basis  of  our  achievements  and 
services,  or  what  seem  to  be  such,  that  other 
people  sum  up  in  our  favour.     But — 

"  Merit  lives  from  man  to  man, 
And  not  from  man,  O  Lord,  to  Thee." 

The  good  opinion  of  men  is  an  invaluable  asset; 
still,  we  need  to  guard  against  the  secret  inward 
elation  which  it  may  foster,  against  the  tendency 
which  leads  us  to  think  we  can  turn  to  face  God 
with  the  same  self-satisfaction  which  our  relations 
with  men  may  seem  to  justify.  A  new  humility 
has  to  control  life  towards  God.  It  is  not  a 
pose  of  insincerity,  nor  an  attempt  to  lash  our 
feelings  into  unreal  self-accusation.  It  is  simply 
the  recognition  of  the  truth  about  ourselves,  as 
that  is  disclosed  in  the  gospel,  the  new  sense  of 


HOW   GOD   IS  PAID  69 

proportion  which  is  aroused  whenever  our  life 
crosses  the  life  of  Jesus.  The  grace  of  God  in 
Christ  lays  our  conceit  low.  His  good-will  over- 
powers us  with  its  wonder  and  magnificence,  and 
the  uppermost  feeling  in  our  hearts,  as  we  meet 
it,  is  that  we  do  not  deserve  such  generosity. 
Instinctively  we  say,  Lord,  I  am  not  worthy.  All 
we  can  plead  is  our  need  of  Him. 

It  is  with  God's  love,  after  all,  as  with  the  love 
of  man;  we  discover  that  we  must  be  content 
to  accept  it  simply  and  modestly  as  a  gift  which 
we  feel  we  do  not  and  cannot  ever  deserve.  The 
astonishing  loyalty,  the  trust,  the  forbearance,  the 
superb  generosity  of  human  love,  are  a  revelation 
which  comes  over  us  now  and  then  with  a  positive 
rush  of  wonder.  What  are  we  to  have  received 
so  wonderful  an  affection?  What  did  this  man, 
what  did  this  woman,  see  in  me  to  move  such 
devoted  love?  We  are  not  to  be  envied  if  we 
have  never  felt  this  sense  of  undeserved  goodness 
at  the  hands  of  those  who  are  near  and  dear  to 
us,  a  feeling  in  which  every  thought  of  personal 
credit  is  submerged.  The  generous  kindness  of 
God  has  the  same  effect  upon  the  human  soul. 
In  His  presence  we  can  only  put  aside  our  pride 
and  shame  and  take  what  He  offers,  grateful  for 
it,  resolved  to  be  more  worthy  of  it,  but  conscious, 
nevertheless,  that  it  is  far  beyond  what  we 
deserve.  That  is  how  His  love  seeks  to  be 
requited. 


7o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

"  What  blessings  Thy  free  bounty  gives 
Let  me  not  cast  away ; 
For  God  is  paid  when  man  receives." 

These  lines  of  Pope  reach  to  the  heart  of  this 
relation  between  the  Giver  and  the  receiver.  It 
is  a  vain  thing  to  work  away  in  some  corner  of 
piety,  anxious  till  we  can  produce  an  amount  of 
worthiness  which  may  make  us  feel  justified  in 
coming  forward  eventually  to  accept  God's 
bounty.  He  is  paid  as  we  receive  His  goodness 
simply.  You  cannot  appreciate  it  rightly?  You 
cannot  claim  it  as  your  due?  You  cannot  think 
yourself  worthy  of  it  yet?  Well,  it  would  not  be 
grace  if  you  could.  And  because  it  is  grace,  the 
grace  of  love,  it  asks  only  to  be  taken  on  its  own 
terms. 

The  sense  of  personal  unworthiness  is  a 
genuine  instinct,  but  it  may  become  morbid.  It 
may  produce  a  scrupulosity  which  is  untrue  to  the 
artless  relations  of  God  and  His  people.  Dr. 
Dale  once  said  an  acute  thing  on  this  point,  with 
regard  to  Maurice.  What  Maurice  really  wanted, 
he  said,  was  "to  be  conscious  that  he  deserved 
all  the  love  and  trust  that  came  to  him."  Now, 
Dale  added  wisely,  "  I  am  more  and  more  clear 
about  this,  that  we  must  be  content  to  know  that 
the  best  things  come  to  us  both  from  man  and 
God  without  our  deserving  them.  We  are  under 
grace,  not  under  law.  Not  until  we  have  beaten 
down  our  pride  and  self-assertion,  so  as  to  be  able 


HOW  GOD   IS   PAID  71 

to  take  everything  from  earth  and  heaven  just  as 
a  child  takes  everything,  without  raising  the  ques- 
tion, Do  I  deserve  this  or  not  ?  or  rather,  with  the 
habitual  conviction  that  we  deserve  nothing  and 
are  content  that  it  should  be  so,  do  we  get  into 
right  relations  either  with  our  Father  in  heaven 
or  with  the  brothers  and  sisters  round  about  us." 
This  is  not  presumptuousness.  It  is  simply  the 
reverent  and  direct  attitude  of  men  and  women 
who  are  not  too  proud  to  take  God  at  His  word 
and  receive  a  grace  which  sweeps  aside  all  mis- 
givings just  as  it  inspires  them  to  real  worthiness 
of  conduct.  Never  think  you  must  somehow 
deserve  God's  fellowship  before  you  can  enjoy 
it.  No  one,  indeed,  can  enjoy  it  without  a  con- 
science for  gratitude  and  consistency  of  life.  But 
no  self-depreciation  or  scruples  must  be  allowed 
to  deter  you  from  receiving  it :  He  is  paid  as  you 
receive  His  bounty.  Don't  be  too  proud  to  take  the 
gift,  as  He  loves  to  give  it,  without  a  thought  of 
merit.  It  is  beautiful  and  honourable  in  one  sense 
to  think  about  meriting  it,  but  that  will  only  come 
in  the  natural  order  as  you  yield  to  its  power  over 
your  heart  and  soul.  Who  that  has  known  what 
love  is,  has  ever  dreamt  that  he  deserved  it? 
Who  that  has  known  what  love  means,  has  ever 
quite  abandoned  the  hope  and  effort  to  be  more 
worthy  of  so  divine  a  gift  ? 


VIII 

THE   CUSTOMS  OF  JESUS 


And  when  he  was  twelve  years  old,  they  went  up  to  Jerusalem, 
after  the  custom  of  the  feast. — Luke  ii.  42. 

A  fid  he  came  to  Nazareth,  where  he  had  bee?z  brought  up :  and 
he  entered,  as  his  custom  was,  into  the  synagogue  on  the  sabbath 
day. — Luke  iv.  16. 

And  he  went,  as  his  custom  was,  tmto  the  mount  of  Olives. 

Luke  xxii.  39. 


VIII 

THE   CUSTOMS  OF  JESUS 

Three  times  in  the  course  of  his  Gospel  Luke 
alludes  to  the  place  of  customs  in  the  religious 
life  of  Jesus. 

To  begin  with,  Jesus  was  born  into  a  family 
of  definitely  religious  habits.  His  -parents  went 
every  year  to  Jerusalem  at  the  feast  of  the  pass- 
over.  And  when  he  was  twelve  years  old,  they 
[accompanied  by  Him]  went  up,  after  the  custom 
of  the  feast.  Every  head  of  a  household  in  the 
provinces,  who  was  strictly  pious,  made  a  con- 
science of  attending  yearly  at  least  one  of  the 
great  festivals  in  Jerusalem,  and,  although  the 
obligation  was  not  binding  upon  women,  Mary 
seems  to  have  obeyed  the  recommendation  of 
some  rabbis  like  Hillel  and  accompanied  her  hus- 
band. Year  after  year  their  annual  absence  from 
home  marked  the  routine  of  the  carpenter's  house- 
hold in  Nazareth.  The  children  knew  why  their 
parents  went  away  for  these  weeks.  When  Jesus 
reached  the  age  of  twelve,  He  became  a  son  of 
the  Law,  and  for  the  first  time  took  part  in  the 
annual  custom  of  the  pilgrimage. 

75 


76  REASONS  AND   REASONS 

It  was  in  the  soil  of  such  devout  family  religion 
as  we  know  existed  among  many  Jews  of  the  age 
that  the  piety  of  our  Lord  struck  root.  And  this 
is  normally  the  beginning  of  all  religious  educa- 
tion. The  first  phase  of  it  is  associated  with  our 
most  receptive  years,  when  we  receive  more  than 
we  are  conscious  of.  "  However  we  may  work  at 
our  religious  faith  later  in  life,  criticize  it,  remodel 
it" — and  Jesus  did  both — "we  must  first  receive 
it.  That  we  have  a  religious  life  to-day  is  not 
due  to  our  philosophers  and  men  of  science,  many 
of  whom  had  no  religion.  It  is  due  to  the  fact 
that  we  learned  to  believe  as  children.  We  do 
not  believe  at  first  because  it  seems  to  us  good  to 
believe  or  reasonable  to  believe,  but  because  we 
are  taught  to  believe."  Such  teaching  ultimately 
depends,  in  the  large  majority  of  cases,  upon  early 
impressions  of  faith  and  reverence  made  by  the 
devout  order  and  regularity  with  which  the 
practices  of  the  Christian  life  and  worship  are 
observed  within  the  home.  The  child's  religion 
needs  to  be  nourished  by  the  sense  that  faith  in 
God  is  as  stable  and  natural  and  constant  as  any 
function  of  the  household.  When  this  impression 
is  made,  during  the  years  in  which  the  instinct  of 
imitation  is  strongest,  religious  habits  are  readily 
and  unconsciously  formed;  they  are  made  for  us 
by  our  seniors,  and  they  acquire  a  sanction  and 
binding  power  just  because  we  can  never  recollect 
a  time  when  they  were  not  acting  upon  our  lives. 


THE   CUSTOMS   OF  JESUS  77 

Nature  itself,  says  Pascal,  may  be  only  a  first 
custom,  as  custom  is  a  second  nature.  Perhaps 
it  is  because  these  first  customs  are  formed  so 
early  that  they  are  often  one  of  the  last  things 
from  which  we  part. 

But,  while  religion  is  transmitted  to  us  along 
the  channels  of  custom  and  tradition,  it  cannot 
remain  a  mere  inheritance  which  is  taken  over 
automatically  from  the  earlier  generation.  Often 
our  early  habits  have  to  be  modified  or  changed, 
in  order  to  suit  the  larger  needs  of  life,  and  even 
when  we  continue  to  adhere  to  the  letter  and  detail 
of  the  old  habits,  we  require  to  put  into  them 
the  consent  and  purpose  of  our  own  characters. 
These  inherited  beliefs  and  practices — or  such 
of  them  as  we  can  retain — must  be  made  our  own, 
in  the  period  of  individual  responsibility.  Luke 
is  careful  to  note  this  advance  in  the  religious  life 
of  Jesus.  Twice  he  implies  that  our  Lord  not 
only  received  customs  from  His  parents,  but  made 
customs  for  Himself. 

The  first  of  these  was  connected  with  public 
worship.  He  came  to  Nazareth,  where  he  had 
been  brought  up:  and,  as  his  custom  was,  he 
went  into  the  synagogue  on  the  sabbath  day. 
Evidently  the  changes  which  had  taken  place  in 
His  residence  and  responsibilities  had  not  inter- 
fered with  His  religious  habits.  As  a  boy  He  had 
been  trained  from  the  age  of  four  to  attend  the 
local  synagogue  with  His  parents,  and  now,  as  a 


78  REASONS  AND   REASONS 

man,  He  continued  the  custom  wherever  He  went, 
not  from  use  or  wont,  in  any  mechanical  fashion, 
but  as  a  method  of  His  own  religious  life. 
Though  He  had  come  back  in  the  power  of  the 
Spirit,  fully  endowed  and  inspired  for  a  unique 
work  of  God,  He  continued  to  frequent  the  place 
of  common  worship.  He  saw  infinitely  more  in 
the  word  and  revelation  of  God  than  His  fellow- 
worshippers.  The  rites  were  simple  and  archaic. 
Nevertheless,  He  made  it  His  custom  still  to  join 
in  the  old  habits  and  to  keep  up  the  practices  of 
public  service.  And  this  is  more  significant  than  we 
sometimes  realize.  It  is  a  reminder  of  the  truth 
which,  in  our  fancied  spirituality,  we  are  apt  to 
forget — that  the  holiest  personal  life  can  scarcely 
afford  to  dispense  with  stated  forms  of  devotion, 
and  that  the  regular  public  worship  of  the  Church, 
for  all  its  local  imperfections  and  dulness,  is  a 
divine  provision  for  sustaining  the  individual  soul. 
We  cannot  affect  to  be  wiser  than  our  Lord  in  this 
matter.  If  any  one  could  have  pled  that  his 
spiritual  experience  was  so  lofty  that  it  did  not 
require  the  stimulus  of  public  worship,  if  any  one 
might  have  felt  that  the  consecration  and  com- 
munion of  his  personal  life  exempted  him  from 
what  ordinary  mortals  needed,  it  was  Jesus.  But 
He  made  no  such  plea.  Sabbath  after  Sabbath 
even  He  was  found  in  the  place  of  worship,  side 
by  side  with  God's  average  people,  not  for  the 
mere  sake  of  setting  a  good  example,  but  for  the 


THE   CUSTOMS   OF   JESUS  79 

deeper  reasons  of  fellowship  with  God  and  man. 
Is  it  reasonable,  then,  that  any  of  us  should  think 
we  can  safely  afford  to  dispense  with  the  pious 
custom  of  regular  participation  in  the  common 
worship  of  our  locality? 

Luke  mentions  yet  another  custom,  which 
flowed  side  by  side  with  this  through  the  religious 
life  of  Jesus.  When  He  left  the  upper  room,  on 
the  last  night  of  His  life,  He  went,  as  his  custom 
was,  to  the  mount  of  Olives.  Why?  Not  simply 
to  be  quiet,  away  from  the  close  atmosphere  and 
din  of  the  crowded  city.  He  doubtless  welcomed 
the  hush  and  coolness  of  Nature,  but  He  also 
drew  strength  from  the  associations  of  personal 
devotion  with  which  He  had  already  hallowed  the 
garden.  It  had  evidently  been  His  custom, 
recently,  to  retire  thither  for  meditation  and  com- 
munion with  the  Father.  The  spot  was  therefore 
consecrated  for  Him  by  His  experiences. 

We  might  practise  the  same  habit  with  advan- 
tage in  our  Christian  life;  in  addition  to  the 
custom  of  public  worship,  it  would  be  well  for  us 
to  endeavour  to  connect  our  private  devotion  with 
definite  places,  either  inside  a  room  of  the  house 
or  outside  with  Nature,  like  Jonathan  Edwards, 
who  paced  the  banks  of  the  Hudson,  and  Leighton, 
who  walked  up  and  down  beside  the  Allan  Water. 
Human  nature  has  a  strange  faculty  for  spoiling 
or  for  hallowing  its  surroundings.  We  know  how 
the  associations  of  a  place  may  become,  through 


8o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

death  or  change,  or  even  through  personal  wrong- 
doing, so  unbearable  to  us  that  we  almost  shrink 
from  revisiting  the  former  scenes.  They  may 
become  invested  with  too  painful  memories  and 
associations.  But  this  tie  of  place  and  heart  can 
affect  us  for  better  as  well  as  for  worse.  A  spot 
or  locality  is  very  much  to  us  what  we  choose  to 
make  it,  and  we  may  stamp  the  outward  environ- 
ment of  life  with  a  mysterious  virtue  and  grace, 
which  acts  like  a  spell  upon  the  mind  whenever 
we  go  to  our  special  surroundings.  They  may 
speak  to  us  of  strength  and  peace  and  reverence, 
just  on  account  of  their  associations  with  a  secret 
experience  which  is  between  us  and  God. 

Doubtless,  prayer  and  fellowship  are  not  tied 
to  any  locality.  Jesus  was  as  near  to  the  Father 
in  Jerusalem  as  anywhere;  He  did  not  require  the 
sights  and  sounds  of  the  garden  to  recall  God  to 
His  mind;  but  is  it  not  significant  that  even  He 
turned  in  the  hour  of  His  spiritual  conflict  to  the 
place  at  which  for  some  time  He  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  be  specially  conscious  of  God's  presence  ? 
Human  experience  generally  finds  it  helpful  to 
employ  this  practice  of  devotion.  Wherever  our 
lot  chances  to  be  cast,  even  for  a  short  time,  in 
town  or  country,  it  is  wise  for  us  to  consecrate 
some  spot,  indoors  or  out  of  doors,  where  we  can 
concentrate  our  minds  in  order  to  feel  specially 
alone  with  God.  If  we  do  so,  the  very  associa- 
tions of  the  place  will  soothe  and  lift  us.     We 


THE  CUSTOMS   OF  JESUS  81 

may  be  inclined  at  first  to  regard  this  as  fanciful 
or  sentimental ;  but  once  more  we  cannot  afford  to 
dispense  with  a  habit  which  Jesus  plainly  found 
essential  to  the  poise  of  His  religious  life.  The 
tie  of  place  and  heart  enters  into  our  most 
spiritual  phases  of  devotion,  and  as  we  form  it 
we  shall  probably  discover  that  our  life  is  gather- 
ing round  it  in  such  places  an  atmosphere  which 
is  charged  with  singularly  deep  and  vital  in- 
fluences, influences  that  help  to  draw  us  readily 
and  almost  inevitably  into  the  sense  of  our 
Father's  peace  and  presence. 


IX 

THE  GREAT  ESTIMATE  OF  JESUS 


Ye  are  they  which  have  continued  with  me  in  my  temptations. 

Luke  xxii.  28. 


IX 

THE   GREAT  ESTIMATE   OF  JESUS 

Evening  is  the  time  for  reflection,  and  when 
people  are  on  the  verge  of  parting  they  are  often 
more  inclined  to  recall  the  past,  with  its  grave  and 
bright  experiences,  than  to  anticipate  the  future. 
Jesus,  sitting  with  His  disciples  on  the  night  be- 
fore His  death,  cast  His  thoughts  backward  as  well 
as  forward.  He  spoke  of  the  future,  in  order  to 
encourage  and  direct  his  followers.  He  warned 
them  against  making  pathos  and  regret  the  key- 
note of  their  faith.     For — 

"Whether  we  be  young  or  old, 
Our  destiny,  our  being's  heart  and  home, 
Is  with  infinitude,  and  only  there  : 
With  hope  it  is,  hope  that  can  never  die, 
Effort,   and  expectation,  and  desire, 
And  something  evermore  about  to  be." 

Jesus  gave  them  the  assurance  that  great  issues 
were  in  store  for  them,  since  He  had  control  of 
their  destiny ;  /  bequeath  to  you  a  kingdom.  But 
He  also  turned  their  thoughts  to  the  days  behind, 
and  spoke  for  a  moment  of  the  part  they  had 
played  in  the  life  which  He  was  now  leaving  upon 
earth.     You  are  the  men  who  have  stood  by  me 

S5 


86  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

in  my  temptations.     That  is  the  great  estimate  of 
Jesus. 

It  is  an  estimate  of  His  own  life.  We  some- 
times speak  about  the  temptations  of  Jesus,  as 
if  the  threefold  experience  which  the  gospels 
chronicle  at  the  opening  of  His  ministry  were  the 
only  period  of  temptation  through  which  He  had 
to  pass,  until  He  came  to  the  garden  of  Geth- 
semane;  but  these  temptations  were  probably 
over  before  any  of  the  disciples  had  joined  Him, 
and  in  any  case  the  long  interval  between  the  two 
crises  had  its  own  discipline.  The  story  of  the 
three  temptations  does  not  exhaust  the  trials  to 
His  fidelity  which  Jesus  encountered;  it  merely 
summarizes  some  of  the  most  characteristic.  He 
was  tempted  by  enthusiasm  and  zeal  to  lower  His 
religion  to  the  popular  level,  tempted  to  falter 
and  draw  back  from  the  line  of  the  Cross,  tempted 
to  lose  patience  with  men,  tempted  by  loneliness, 
tempted  by  those  who  cared  most  for  Him — some 
of  His  subtlest  temptations  were  whispered  from 
the  lips  of  His  mother  and  His  greatest  friends. 
He  suffered,  being  tempted.  He  was  keenly 
sensitive  to  the  characteristic  desires  and  passions 
of  our  nature.  Of  all  this  inner  experience  He 
rarely  spoke  to  others.  The  deeper  a  nature  is, 
the  less  demonstrative  and  voluble  it  is  about 
such  matters.  But  it  is  remarkable  that,  when 
He  does  take  His  disciples  into  His  confidence, 
the  word  He  chooses  for  His  life  is  not  "  my 


THE   GREAT   ESTIMATE   OF  JESUS  87 

achievements,"   not   "my  disappointments,"   not 
"  my  hardships,"  but  my  temptations. 

The  disciples  had  witnessed  some  of  them. 
They  knew  how  He  had  been  flattered  and  threat- 
ened. They  were  aware  of  the  strong  influences 
which  had  been  brought  to  bear  upon  Him,  in 
order  to  force  Him  to  abandon  or  to  modify  His 
mission;  but  they  cannot  have  had  any  concep- 
tion of  the  continuous  pressure  against  which  He 
had  to  contend  for  His  faith  and  service.  People 
seldom  realize  that  the  outside  work  of  life  may 
have  to  be  carried  on,  while  inwardly  the  soul  is 
fighting  a  battle  of  its  own  against  subtle  treachery 
and  weakness  of  will.  Even  Jesus  had  to  repel 
the  ordinary  temptations  of  trouble  and  happi- 
ness, as  He  went  about  His  mission.  They  were 
intensely  real  to  Him,  though  few  suspected, 
from  His  strong,  calm  character,  that  He  had 
repeatedly  to  overcome  the  shrinking  from  pain 
and  the  instinct  for  joy  which  are  natural  to  our 
being. 

Some  of  life's  difficulties  cannot  be  hidden. 
They  are  more  or  less  public  property,  and,  as 
our  friends  see  us  face  to  face  with  them,  their 
sympathy,  spoken  or  unspoken,  nerves  us  to  bear 
the  strain.  But  how  many  temptations  assail  us, 
of  which  even  those  near  to  us  know  nothing ! 
They  know  nothing,  and  they  ought  to  know 
nothing.  Part  of  our  discipline  is  to  meet  and 
master  such  impulses  in  secret.      It  would  not 


88  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

help  us,  in  many  cases,  to  canvass  for  sympathy, 
carrying  the  cup  of  misery  round  our  circle  in 
order  to  get  it  sweetened.  Nor  would  it  be  fair  to 
our  relatives  and  friends  to  insist  upon  them  shar- 
ing every  item  of  our  private  conflicts.  The 
strong  soul  knows  when  to  be  reticent,  for  its  own 
sake  and  for  the  sake  of  others.  Many  a  man 
or  woman  in  their  own  way  can  echo  that  word  of 
Jesus  :  my  temptations.  Sometimes  it  looks  as 
if  life  consisted  of  little  else,  or  as  if  no  one 
realized  how  much  we  have  to  try  our  faith  and 
patience.  We  are  above  the  weakness  which 
likes  to  parade  its  doubts  and  troubles.  We  have 
to  keep  a  brave  front  to  the  outside  world,  while 
the  heart  within  is  often  sick  and  afraid.  Well, 
it  is  a  strength  to  remember  that,  while  other 
people  may  never  suspect  the  weight  of  our  diffi- 
culties or  even  imagine  we  have  anything  special 
to  fight  against,  we  are  passing  through  a  moral 
experience  akin  to  that  of  Jesus.  He  went 
through  that  trial,  and  His  spirit  is  with  us  in  the 
ordeal. 

Once  more.  He  had  a  generous  estimate  of 
His  disciples.  You  are  the  men  who  have  con- 
tinued zvith  me  in  my  temptations.  They  were 
at  His  side  that  evening.  But  they  might  not 
have  been  there.  One  of  them,  as  He  spoke,  was 
hurrying  along  the  dark  streets  to  betray  Him. 
Others,  over  the  country,  had  fallen  away  from 
Him  because  He  had  disappointed  their  private 


THE   GREAT   ESTIMATE   OF  JESUS  89 

hopes  or  put  too  severe  a  strain  upon  their  endur- 
ance. Now,  cowardice  is  apt  to  be  infectious; 
it  easily  spreads  among  the  members  of  a  society. 
Jesus  therefore  appreciated  the  more  highly  those 
who  had  survived  the  sifting  of  His  mission. 
He  knew  how  easy  it  was  for  human  nature  to 
give  way,  and  He  recognized  that  it  said  a  great 
deal  for  these  men  that  they  had  lasted  to  the  end. 
Their  loyalty,  indeed,  had  not  always  been  in- 
telligent. More  than  once  they  had  doubted  His 
wisdom  and  even  hesitated  for  a  moment;  but 
they  had  never  gone  back,  and  Jesus  generously 
appreciated  the  support  of  their  staunch  persever- 
ance. He  could  stand  alone.  But  He  had  no 
proud  indifference  to  human  sympathy ;  He  never 
disguised  His  sensitiveness  to  affection  or  His 
desire  for  companionship  in  a  crisis,  and  there- 
fore, whenever  the  disciples  could  offer  Him,  if 
not  counsel,  at  least  sturdy  belief  in  His  cause, 
He  welcomed  it  eagerly.  Faithfulness  of  this 
order,  like  charity,  covers  many  a  defect.  "  Be- 
lieve me,"  Charlotte  Bronte  wrote  to  Mrs.  Gaskell, 
"  though  I  was  born  in  April,  the  month  of  cloud 
and  sunshine,  I  am  not  changeful.  My  spirits 
are  unequal,  and  sometimes  I  speak  vehemently, 
and  sometimes  I  say  nothing  at  all;  but  I  have 
a  steady  regard  for  you,  and  if  you  will  let  the 
cloud  and  shower  pass  by,  be  sure  the  sun  is 
always  behind,  obscured,  but  still  existing." 
Faithfulness  is  accompanied  in  some  natures  by  a 


go  REASONS  AND   REASONS 

certain  sternness  or  even  brusqueness  of  manner; 
for  the  most  charming  and  demonstrative  people 
are  not  invariably  the  most  reliable.  The  willow 
has  a  smoother  stem  than  the  oak.  But  the  willow 
bends.  Faithfulness  does  not  mean  even  that 
rebukes  and  reproaches  are  unknown.  The 
disciples  had  more  than  once  drawn  such  upon 
themselves,  by  their  dulness,  or  prejudice,  or 
ambition.  Only  a  moment  before,  they  had  been 
quarrelling  like  children  over  a  question  of  pre- 
cedence. But  under  all  these  flaws,  the  gener- 
osity and  insight  of  Jesus  marked  the  redeeming 
feature  of  their  life  as  a  whole  :  they  had  lasted. 

You  are  the  men  who  have  stood  by  me  in  my 
temptations.  Possibly  some  of  them  felt  a  trifle 
ashamed  to  receive  such  praise.  They  may  have 
remembered  how  little  use  they  had  been  to  Jesus 
at  the  crucial  moments  of  His  career,  and  how 
inadequately  they  had  supported  Him.  We  must 
all  have  such  reflections  about  ourselves.  A 
sincere  heart  almost  shrinks  from  being  praised. 
The  thanks  we  get  seem  far  too  generous.  We 
are  ashamed  to  think  how  little  we  have  done  to 
deserve  the  recognition  we  receive  from  God  or 
from  our  fellows.  But,  in  the  estimate  of  life,  as 
Jesus  made  it,  loyalty  stands  out  conspicuous. 
"  Whatever  else  you  have  done  or  left  undone,  of 
which  you  may  be  ashamed,  you  have  done  one 
thing  of  which  I  am  proud  :  you  h-ave  continued 
with  ?ne  in  my  temptations." 


THE   GREAT   ESTIMATE   OF  JESUS  91 

Ordinary  life  cannot  be  full  of  dazzling  exploits 
or  striking  words.  But  it  is  a  great  thing  in  the 
sight  of  God — we  might  almost  say  it  is  the  great 
thing — to  be  at  our  post,  and  to  keep  at  our  post 
through  the  vicissitudes  and  monotony  of  the  long 
hours,  to  maintain  the  Christian  outlook  upon  life, 
in  spite  of  all  temptations  to  fall  back  on  lower 
standards,  to  act  steadily  upon  definite  Christian 
motives,  and  to  subordinate  personal  hopes  and 
fears  to  the  interests  of  the  cause  with  which  God 
has  honoured  us  in  the  spirit  and  the  company  of 
Jesus. 


X 
LOYALTY  TO  GOD 


Joab  had  turned  after  Adonijah^  though   he  turned  not  after 
Absalo7ii.—\  Kings  ii.  28. 


X 

LOYALTY  TO   GOD 

Most  of  us  start  with  early  ideals  of  faith  in 
God  and  man  which,  in  the  generous  hours  of 
youth,  we  pledge  ourselves  to  hold  in  practice  no 
less  than  in  theory.  We  are  prepared  to  stand 
by  them.  But  it  is  not  enough  to  commit  and 
consecrate  ourselves  to  the  Christian  enterprise  at 
the  outset.  Although  our  inexperience  will  hardly 
credit  it,  ideals  may  be  lost,  and  lost  they  will  be 
unless  we  are  alert  to  renew  them,  or  rather  to 
renew  our  hold  of  them  as  life  opens  out  into 
responsibilities  and  interests  which  repeatedly 
create  a  new  situation  for  our  moral  growth.  If 
we  imagine  that  faithfulness  to  God  or  man  goes 
on  by  a  momentum  of  its  own,  we  are  in  danger 
of  the  error  which  covered  Joab  with  sudden 
disgrace  at  the  end  of  his  career. 

Joab  has  been  called  the  Douglas  of  the  house 
of  David.  He  was  the  staunch  and  skilful 
general,  without  whose  aid  the  monarchy  would 
not  have  been  established.  He  had  his  faults. 
He  was  vindictive  and  imperious,  but  he  was 
fiercely  loyal  to  the  king,  and  at  the  critical 
moment  when  Absalom's  rebellion  broke  out  he 

95 


96  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

saved  the  situation  by  siding  with  David  and 
refusing  to  swerve  from  his  chief.  He  turned  not 
after  the  brilliant  young  Absalom.  Yet,  some 
years  later,  towards  the  close  of  David's  reign, 
when  another  rebellion  tested  his  principles,  he 
turned  after  Adonijah.  This  time  he  failed.  He 
had  lost  none  of  his  early  rashness,  says  Ewald, 
and  probably  Adonijah  had  promised  to  forgive 
his  earlier  offences.  The  loyalty  which  had 
carried  him  through  one  reign  did  not,  at  any  rate, 
stand  the  strain  of  another.  He  sided  with  the 
upstart  and  was  ignominiously  put  to  death  as  a 
traitor.  The  pity  of  it !  To  tarnish  his  record 
on  the  last  page !  To  grow  infatuated  over  a 
poor  creature  like  Adonijah  after  resisting  the 
fascination  of  Absalom ! 

Yet  people  may  thus  succumb  to  the  temptations 
of  mature  life,  after  passing  successfully  through 
earlier  seductions.  He  turned  after  Adonijah^ 
though  he  had  not  turned  after  Absalom.  Why 
is  that  true  of  many  careers?  Partly  because 
people  are  not  sufficiently  alive  to  the  changing 
forms  and  phases  of  temptation.  These  vary,  in 
character  or  in  intensity,  with  successive  periods 
in  life.  Youth,  for  example,  is  more  in  danger 
of  recklessness  and  impulsiveness;  age,  of 
obstinacy  or  of  a  disposition  to  cultivate  its  own 
garden,  indifferent  to  the  troubles  of  other  people. 
"  I  could  be  sorry  for  these  men,"  says  the  ex- 
Abbot  Boniface  at  Dundrennan,  "  ay,  and  for  that 


LOYALTY   TO   GOD  97 

poor  queen;  but  what  avail  earthly  sorrows  to  a 
man  of  fourscore? — and  it  is  a  rare  dropping 
morning  for  the  early  colewort."  Feeling  is  less 
easily  stirred  as  we  mature,  and  this  accounts  for 
a  change  of  our  temptations.  Ridicule,  again, 
tells  more  upon  our  early  years  than  on  our  later, 
as  a  rule.  Vanity,  which  is  one  of  the  most  serious 
dangers  to  loyalty,  reappears  in  old  age  as  well 
as  in  youth.  But  a  fault  like  avarice  is  more 
common  in  mature  life,  and  so  is  cynicism,  which 
is  rarely  anything  but  an  affectation  in  young 
people.  There  are  even  physical  reasons  why 
certain  temptations  to  irritability  and  sluggishness 
acquire  a  firmer  hold  upon  the  more  advanced 
phases  of  human  character.  Celibates  will  some- 
times confess,  for  example,  that  the  vow  of 
abstinence  from  marriage  presses  upon  them  with 
special  heaviness  about  the  age  of  forty.  In  short, 
temptations  to  selfishness  or  compromise  or  self- 
indulgence,  which  ten  or  twenty  years  ago  would 
have  been  brushed  aside,  may  appeal  to  us  to-day 
with  an  unwonted  power  of  attraction  which  it 
requires  all  our  moral  strength  to  resist.  Mar- 
riage, family  life,  the  duties  of  a  profession,  the 
pressure  of  new  responsibilities,  the  anxieties  of 
a  high  position,  the  larger  freedom  of  success — 
these  may  create  a  moral  situation  which  requires 
to  be  thought  out  afresh  in  the  light  of  our  devo- 
tion to  God,  if  we  are  keen  to  prevent  any  weak- 
ness from  getting  an  unsuspected  grasp  of  our 

H 


9S  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

natures.  Philip  Doddridge  began  his  great  con- 
secration hymn  with  the  glowing  lines — 

"O  happy  day  that  fixed  my  choice 

On  Thee,  my  Saviour,  and  my  God  ! " 

But  he  ended  by  declaring — 

"  High  heaven,  that  heard  the  solemn  vow, 
That  vow  renewed  shall  daily  hear." 

There  is  a  profound  wisdom  in  this  resolve  to 
renew  the  early  loyalty  from  time  to  time.  Such 
a  type  of  piety  will  be  above  the  reproach  of  being 
no  more  than  an  initial  spasm  followed  by  a 
chronic  inertia. 

But  when  the  first  flush  of  consecration  is  upon 
us,  we  find  it  difficult  to  take  such  warnings 
seriously.  We  are  apt  almost  to  resent  the  sugges- 
tion that  we  could  possibly  be  tempted  to  prove 
faithless  to  our  vows  or  to  abate  one  jot  of  our 
enthusiasm.  It  is  natural  to  think  we  have 
decided  our  future,  and  that  the  lower  self,  over 
which  we  have  triumphed,  cannot  reassert  itself. 
The  consciousness  that  we  have  taken  our  stand 
openly,  at  some  cost  to  ourselves,  thrills  us  with  a 
sense  of  permanence.  Instinctively  we  protest, 
with  Peter,  Though  all  shall  be  offended  in  theey 
I  will  never  be  offended.  We  shrink  from  the 
mere  thought  of  treachery  as  though  it  were  a 
reflection  upon  our  honesty. 

Now,  it  is  true  that  every  decision  imparts  an 
impulse  and  strength  to  our  moral  nature.     The 


LOYALTY   TO   GOD  99 

early  consecration  does  become  a  power  of  heart 
and  will.  Only,  as  we  enter  into  life,  faith  in 
God  presents  itself  as  a  much  more  complex  busi- 
ness than  it  at  first  appeared ;  besides,  old  tempta- 
tions have  a  way  of  rising  up  again,  after  the 
romance  of  the  start  has  subsided;  a  time  arrives 
when  we  have  to  encounter  the  resistance  and 
monotony  of  the  world,  the  apparent  indifference 
of  many  to  what  we  cherish,  the  disappointing 
lives  of  our  associates,  the  subtle  temptations 
which  incline  us  to  consider  self-sacrifice  rather 
quixotic  after  all,  enthusiasm  a  fever  of  child- 
hood, and  faith  a  boyish  dream.  These  things  have 
to  be  met.  They  may  embitter  our  zeal,  or  shake 
our  faith,  or  cool  our  interest.  They  can  turn — 
they  have  turned — men  and  women  from  early 
loyalty  to  God  and  from  chivalrous  devotion  to 
the  interests  of  their  fellow-men.  And  if  they 
are  to  be  surmounted  by  us  without  faltering,  it 
must  be  by  taking  the  oath  of  loyalty  over  again, 
with  a  more  intelligent  grasp  of  all  that  it 
involves.  Let  him  that  thinketh  he  standeth  take 
heed  lest  he  fall.  Joab  fell.  He  turned  after 
Adonijahi  though  he  turned  not  after  Absalom. 
And  any  one  may  swerve  from  loyalty  if  he  pre- 
sumes upon  his  past  exploits,  or  assumes  that 
the  momentum  of  yesterday  will  avail  of  itself  to 
carry  him  through  the  seductions  of  to-day. 

No  one,  however  experienced,  can  afford  to  live 
on  the  mere   memory  and   credit  of  an   earlier 
h  2 


ioo  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

devotion.  We  dare  not  take  for  granted  that  our 
motives  are  as  pure  as  they  once  were.  Circum- 
stances alter,  and  we  will  do  well  to  suspect  that 
our  characters  may  have  also  altered — not  always 
for  the  better — that  we  may  have  become  insens- 
ibly less  disinterested  and  trustworthy.  We  may 
be  baptizing  prejudice  in  the  name  of  principle, 
or  thinking  ourselves  tolerant  when  we  have  really 
become  lax;  in  fact,  almost  every  development  of 
life  brings  with  it  the  possibility  of  unfaithfulness, 
at  some  point  or  other,  to  the  early  ideal.  And 
the  call  is,  to  renew  our  vows  in  face  of  the  novel 
circumstances.  You  do  that  instinctively  at  the 
outward  crises  of  life,  when  you  are  married,  when 
your  children  are  born  and  when  they  go  to  school, 
on  the  occasion  of  a  death  in  your  home,  or  when 
your  work  is  altered.  But  there  are  crises  which 
are  equally  momentous,  though  they  are  not  so 
well  marked — crises  which  are  profoundly  signifi- 
cant for  moral  and  spiritual  loyalty.  The  man 
who  has  a  faithful  conscience  will  be  on  the  look- 
out for  these  imperceptible  changes,  lest  they 
render  his  will  unstable  or  dim  his  powers  of 
judgment.  Particularly  as  the  conditions  of  his 
lot  grow  comparatively  prosperous  and  smooth, 
he  will  take  care  in  case  the  fibre  of  self-sacrifice 
be  softened,  or  the  heart  grow  callous. 

joab  turned  after  Adonijah,  though  he  turned 
not  after  Absalom,  He  had  perhaps  one  excuse 
which  is  never  ours.     His  master  had  ceased  to 


LOYALTY  TO  GOD  101 

be  heroic.  The  old  age  of  David  is  not  a  lovely 
spectacle,  and  Solomon  inherited  some  of  his 
father's  least  admirable  traits.  Joab,  in  the  last 
phase  or  dotage  of  David,  can  hardly  have  found 
much  to  command  his  hero-worship,  and  this  may 
explain  in  part  his  unaccountable  lapse  from 
loyalty.  The  Son  of  David  to  whom  our  fealty  is 
pledged  puts  no  such  strain  upon  His  followers. 
On  the  contrary,  we  find  more  and  more  reason 
for  our  loyalty  to  His  service,  as  the  rising 
problems  of  every  age  call  out  fresh  aspects  of 
the  gospel  which  inspire  self-sacrifice  and  elicit 
the  highest  energies  of  mind  and  soul  in  Christian 
men.  No,  if  we  turn  aside  from  Christ,  or  abate 
our  confidence  in  His  cause,  ours  is  the  discredit 
of  the  lapse.  But  surely  we  will  not  fail  Him  now, 
perhaps  after  years  of  honourable  service.  Some 
of  us  may  be  just  where  Joab  was,  with  a  good 
record  behind  us  and  the  last  treacherous  tempta- 
tions of  middle  age  rising  beside  us.  Let  us  say 
to  ourselves  and  to  one  another,  "  You  won't  give 
way  at  the  close?  You  won't  spoil  your  record 
by  dropping  the  old  flag  at  this  time  of  day  ?  For 
what  is  faithfulness  to  God  or  man  worth  if  it  is 
not  faithfulness  to  death,  a  faithfulness  that  will 
not  betray  Him  or  desert  Him  in  the  afternoon 
or  in  the  evening  any  more  than  in  the  morning 
hours  ? " 


XI 

FAITH  AND  LOVE  THEIR  OWN  DEFENCE 


Putting  on  the  breastplate  of  faith  and  love —\  Thess.  v.  8. 


XI 

FAITH  AND  LOVE    THEIR    OWN  DEFENCE 

Life,  as  we  find  it  lived,  appears  able  at  times 
to  inflict  such  wounds  on  faith  in  the  goodness 
of  God  or  man,  that  it  is  no  wonder  people  are 
acutely  sensible  of  the  dangers  to  which  the  events 
and  intercourse  of  the  world  expose  the  Christian 
temper  of  trust  in  God  and  of  that  forgiving, 
generous  disposition  inspired  by  genuine  belief. 
What  can  we  do,  they  will  ask,  to  safeguard  the 
spiritual  mind?  In  the  long  run  you  can  do 
nothing,  Paul  replies,  except — believe  and  love, 
go  on  believing  in  spite  of  appearances,  go  on 
loving  your  fellow-men  in  face  of  disappointing 
experiences  at  their  hands.  Faith  is  its  own 
corselet,  and  so  is  love.  They  are  fit  to  bear  any 
contact  with  the  world  of  men  and  things,  if  only 
you  will  put  them  on.  This  coat  of  mail,  which 
protects  the  vital  organs,  is  not  an  artificial  device, 
added  to  their  nature.  Let  us  put  on,  says  Paul, 
the  corselet  of  faith  and  love.  He  means  that 
they  are  useless  if  they  are  not  brought  directly 
into  touch  with  the  facts  of  life.  The  worst  enemy 
of  personal  religion  is  not  some  outside  combina- 

105 


io6  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

tion  of  circumstances,  nor  even  a  theory  of  deter- 
minism which  threatens  to  evaporate  responsi- 
bility, but  the  inward  indolence  which  turns  Chris- 
tianity from  a  force  into  a  form,  the  rust  of  disuse 
which  deprives  it  of  practical  value  by  hesitating 
to  put  it  into  action.  Montaigne,  said  Dean 
Church,  "  has  the  power  of  suspending  absolutely 
his  belief  and  the  natural  effect  it  would  have  on 
a  thoughtful  mind  busy  with  man's  nature  and 
fortunes."  We  have  all  that  mischievous  power, 
and  it  is  when  people  hang  up  faith  and  love  in 
the  armoury,  leaving  them  to  become  fine  theories 
or  beautiful  ideals  which  are  no  longer  ready  to 
cope  with  actual  existence,  that  their  religious  life 
is  doomed  to  lose  its  strength  and  nerve.  Let  us 
put  on  the  corselet  of  faith  and  love.  That  is  the 
only  way  to  possess  and  honour  them.  Use  them 
or  you  lose  them,  and  in  losing  them  you  lose 
yourself. 

The  Christian  must  arm  himself.  There  are 
some  things  which  no  one  can  do  for  another,  and 
this  is  one  of  them.  The  State  may  interpose  to 
prevent  Christianity  from  being  unfairly  treated; 
Paul  frankly  recognized  that  help  in  his  own 
career.  But  such  a  defence  of  the  faith  neither 
creates  nor  sustains  personal  religion.  Creeds 
have  their  place  and  function,  but  it  is  notorious 
that  behind  the  most  elaborate  and  orthodox 
articles  of  a  confession  the  spirit  of  personal 
Christianity  may  readily  decline.     The  organiza- 


FAITH   AND   LOVE   THEIR   OWN   DEFENCE     107 

tion  of  the  Church  is  a  real  aid  to  faith  and  love ; 
none  knew  better  than  Paul  the  vital  support  and 
stimulus  afforded  by  social  fellowship  to  indi- 
vidual Christians.  Nevertheless,  the  only  faith 
which  ultimately  avails  is  the  faith  of  personal 
convictions  verified  in  experience  and  brought  into 
action  on  the  field  of  real  life.  The  services  of 
theology  and  institutions  are  not  to  be  under- 
valued in  the  apology  for  the  Christian  faith, 
but  they  need  to  be  informed  by  a  spirit  which  is 
not  of  themselves.  Their  influence  requires  to  be 
supplemented  by  the  practical  conduct  of  indi- 
vidual Christians,  which,  after  all,  is  the  most  tell- 
ing reason  for  the  faith  that  is  in  us.  Of  theology 
and  institutions  in  Christianity  we  may  almost  say 
what  Cavour  once  said  of  political  apologetic  : 
'  To  every  one  his  work.  The  philosopher  and 
the  economist,  in  the  seclusion  of  their  studies, 
will  confute  the  errors  of  communism;  but  their 
labour  will  bear  no  fruit  unless  men  practise  the 
great  principle  of  universal  benevolence,  and  act 
upon  the  heart  while  science  acts  upon  the  intel- 
lect." It  is  the  practical  exercise  of  Christian 
faith  and  love  which  alone  makes  the  efforts  of 
a  theoretic  apology  for  our  religion  successful. 
The  latter  must  be  accompanied  by  a  display  of 
vital  energy  in  the  sphere  of  personal  religion. 

Furthermore,  the  very  organization  of  the 
Church,  which  enlarges  our  personal  faith  and 
affords  a  sphere  for  the  love  inspired  by  faith,  may 


io8  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

be  almost  as  much  of  a  trial  as  a  help  in  certain 
cases.  Membership  of  a  Church  may  reveal,  as 
people  come  into  close  relations,  some  of  the 
most  irritating  and  petty  traits  in  human  nature.  It 
often  invigorates  us  with  the  stimulus  of  example 
and  comradeship,  but  it  as  often  discloses  faults 
and  foibles.  It  may — it  frequently  does — throw 
us  into  touch  with  people  with  whom  it  is  ex- 
tremely difficult  to  get  on.  They  provoke  us  to 
lose  temper  and  patience.  They  cool  our  gener- 
ous hopes  of  men.  There  is  a  temptation  to  dis- 
trust or  even  to  despise  some  of  our  fellow- 
Christians,  when,  like  these  believers  at  Thes- 
salonica,  we  discover  to  our  annoyance  that  our 
charity  is  being  abused,  our  advice  ignored,  our 
motives  unfairly  judged,  our  forbearance  taken 
advantage  of  by  the  unscrupulous,  and  our 
services  received  without  much  gratitude.  This 
is  where  the  danger  of  cynicism  and  selfishness 
lies  in  wait  for  us,  with  that  heart-burning  and 
resentment  which  are  the  very  destruction  of  the 
soul.  There  is  nothing  for  it  but  to  meet  such 
people  steadily  upon  Christian  terms.  We  must 
let  our  religion  determine  our  estimate  of  the 
world  and  our  attitude  towards  it.  Nothing  but 
love,  after  all,  can  keep  love  alive.  It  is  only  as 
we  continue  to  work  with  people  and  for  them 
under  the  obligations  of  the  Lord  in  whom  we 
believe,  that  we  can  manage  to  ward  off  the  deadly 
onset  of  suspicion  and  indifference. 


FAITH    AND   LOVE   THEIR   OWN   DEFENCE    109 

To  think  and  act  with  such  unswerving  gener- 
osity means  courage  of  a  high  order.  That  is  why 
love  of  this  heroic,  unflagging  nature  depends 
on  faith,  just  as  real  faith  in  turn  will  not  survive 
the  collapse  of  love.  The  one  is  organic  to  the 
other.  Let  us  put  on  faith  and  love  as  our 
corselet,  the  love  which  respects  men  for  the  sake 
and  in  the  strength  of  the  Christ,  their  Lord  and 
ours,  in  whom  we  ourselves  believe.  Faith  and 
love  have  no  other  function  in  this  world.  What- 
ever we  do  with  them,  we  have  to  live  by  them. 
That  is  the  only  way  in  which  they  can  be  living 
for  us.  Otherwise  they  have  no  reason  for  exist- 
ence. They  are  armour,  not  decorations,  and  any 
attempt  to  suspend  or  abate  their  influence  over 
the  real  motives  and  interests  of  our  life  means 
a  defeat  and  a  retreat  from  our  high  calling.  In 
this  life  of  Christianity  we  are  liable  at  any  stage 
to  encounter  deadly  wounds  from  scepticism  and 
selfishness.  The  very  enterprise  and  excellence 
of  the  faith  exposes  us  with  special  force  to  some 
of  these  temptations.  But  should  any  of  us 
imagine  that  Christian  faith  and  love  are  fragile, 
delicate  qualities,  which  require  artificial  protec- 
tion from  the  outside  if  they  are  to  survive  con- 
tact with  the  rude  world  of  men  and  things,  it  is 
because  we  are  not  venturing  to  put  them  bravely 
into  action,  and  to  see  how  much  they  can  stand. 
Their  practice  is  their  best  protection. 


XII 

THE    ONLY  SCHOOL1! 


Finally,  brethren,  whatsoever  things  are  true,  whatsoever  things 
are  honourable,  whatsoever  things  arc  just,  whatsoever  things  are 
pure,  whatsoever  things  are  lovely,  whatsoever  things  are  of  good 
report;  if  there  be  any  virtue,  and  if  there  be  any  praise,  think  on 
*  these  things.  The  things  which  ye  both  learned  and  received  and 
heard  and  saw  in  me,  these  things  do  :  and  the  God  of  peace  shall 
be  with  you. — Phil.  iv.  8,  9. 


XII 

THE    ONLY  SCHOOL! 

These  glowing  words  come  with  an  unbroken 
rush  from  the  apostle.  But  we  feel  instinctively 
a  difference  in  their  tone.  The  first  sentence, 
with  its  passion  for  the  beauty  and  range  of  the 
moral  ideal,  might  almost  have  been  written  by 
a  Greek  sage ;  the  second  sentence  could  only 
have  come  from  a  Jew,  or  at  least  from  a  Chris- 
tian who  had  been  born  within  Judaism.  Yet 
both  sentences  flow  together  here.  "  It  is,"  as  a 
critic  of  the  New  Testament  observes,  "  it  is  as 
if  we  heard  the  ripple  of  the  waves  at  the  meet- 
ing of  the  two  streams  which  have  their  source 
in  Zion  and  the  Parthenon." 

But  there  is  a  deeper  difference  still  between 
the  outlook  of  the  two  verses.  In  the  former 
Paul  lifts  the  eyes  of  his  readers  to  the  vista  of 
moral  goodness.  Whatever  is  true,  whatever  is 
to  be  revered,  whatever  is  just,  whatever  is  pure, 
whatever  is  gracious,  whatever  is  high-toned,  what- 
ever excellence  or  object  of  due  praise  there  is, 
think  upon  all  this.  Then  he  adds,  Whatever  you 
i  113 


ii4  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

learned  and  received  from  me,  whatever  you  heard 
me  say,  whatever  you  saw  me  do,  do  that  your- 
selves; and  the  God  of  feace  shall  be  with  you. 
Reflection  provides  the  initiative  and  the  standard 
for  conduct.  Think  .  .  .  do.  But  the  influence 
of  right  ideas  and  lofty  aims  is  also  backed  up 
by  the  force  of  personal  example,  as  if  the  one 
naturally  supplemented  the  other. 

There  was  a  special  reason  for  this  emphasis 
upon  example.  Paul  was  the  first  Christian  these 
people  had  ever  seen.  Their  earliest  impressions 
of  Christianity  were  associated  with  the  apostle. 
As  Cowper  wrote  of  Wolfe,  he  had 

"Put  so  much  of  his  heart  into  his  act, 
That  his  example  had  a  magnet's  force, 
And  all  were  swift  to  follow  whom  all  loved." 

In  the  mission-field,  as  well  as  in  the  early  stages 
of  moral  education,  we  can  verify  this  principle. 
At  a  certain  period  truths  come  home  to  the  mind 
and  conscience  most  effectively  through  their 
embodiment  in  personal  character,  and  hero- 
worship  witnesses  to  the  same  law  in  the  higher 
reaches  of  maturer  life.  Repeatedly  we  are  drawn 
to  some  duty  or  roused  to  some  aspiration  by 
observing  the  presence  of  these  in  a  noble  char- 
acter. It  is  no  longer  a  question  of  things  but 
of  persons.  One  great  function,  not  simply  of 
biography  and  history  but  of  our  friendships  and 
intercourse,   is   to   stir  life  with   a  power  which 


THE   ONLY  SCHOOL?  115 

abstract  claims  of  virtue  could  scarcely  exert  over 
us.     Think,  for  instance,  of  all  that  lay  behind 
the  young   Italians  of  last  century  who,  in  the 
struggle  for  their  country's  freedom,  died,  con- 
fessing their  faith  in  "  God,  Mazzini  and  Duty !  " 
Consider  what  Mazzini  must  have  been  to  them, 
when    they    could    realize    God    and    duty    best 
through  their  experience  of  their  leader.    On  far 
less  heroic  levels  we  can  hope  to  enter  into  such  a 
feeling  of  personal  enthusiasm  and  indebtedness. 
We  do  not  always  realize  what  is  noblest  and 
purest  in  life,  and,  even  when  we  do,  it  does  not 
follow  that  we  are  attracted  by  it.     But  when  we 
find  principles   and   aims   represented   by   some 
human  character  which  we  can  touch  and  watch,  we 
often  respond  to  this  influence,  and,  out  of  loyalty 
and  admiration  for  living  men  and  women,  set 
ourselves  to  high  attainments.   Most  people  at  one 
time  or  another  in  the  course  of  their  lives  have 
understood  better  what  God's  mercy  and  patience 
mean,  by  having  come  under  the  spell  of  a  human 
soul  which,   for  all   its  defects  and  limitations, 
has  been  able  to  make  these  truths  live  in  act 
as   well    as   in   word   and   statement.      "  I    have 
to-day  seen  the  face  of  Garibaldi,"  said  Madame 
Meuricoffre,  "and  all  the  devotion  of  his  friends 
is  made  as  clear  as  day  to  me.     One  could  love 
the  cause  without  seeing  him,  but  in  seeing  him 
you  seem  to  be  suddenly  gifted  with  the  power 
of  seeing  it  as  he  sees  it,  and  you  love  it  better 
1  2 


n6  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

for  his  sake,  while  you  wholly  honour  and  admire 
him  for  its  sake." 

This  debt  involves  a  similar  debt  on  our  part 
to  some  people  in  our  circle.  They  should  be  in 
a  position  to  quote  our  character  in  favour  of  our 
creed,  and  we  ought  to  be  able  to  put  forward 
our  lives  before  those  who  look  up  to  us,  as  a 
pledge  for  what  we  believe.  It  is  our  duty  so  to 
live  with  them  that  they  shall  somehow  be  able 
to  associate  us  with  their  conceptions  of  what  God 
expects  and  receives  from  a  human  soul.  The 
exercise  of  this  influence  means  an  absence  of 
pretension  and  self-consciousness;  it  depends 
upon  the  impression  which  others  feel  of  our 
absolute  sincerity  and  unselfishness  in  the  pursuit 
of  the  high  ends  to  which  we  summon  our  fellows ; 
for  no  one  is  ever  impressive  if  he  is  always 
thinking  about  making  an  impression  or  if  he 
parades  his  virtues  with  an  air  of  superiority. 
But,  above  all,  it  involves  consistency — that  is, 
a  humble  and  resolute  effort  to  tolerate  no  gap 
between  what  we  know  and  what  we  do.  '  There 
may  be,"  says  Stevenson,  "  something  more  finely 
sensitive  in  the  modern  humour,  that  tends  more 
and  more  to  withdraw  a  man's  personality  from 
the  lessons  he  inculcates,  or  the  cause  he  has 
espoused;  but  there  is  a  loss  herewith  of  whole- 
some responsibility;  and  when  we  find  in  the 
works  of  Knox,  as  in  the  epistles  of  Paul,  the 
man  himself  standing  nakedly  forward,  courting 


THE   ONLY  SCHOOL?  117 

and  anticipating  criticism,  putting  his  character, 
as  it  were,  in  pledge  for  the  sincerity  of  his 
doctrine,  we  had  best  waive  the  question  of 
delicacy,  and  make  our  acknowledgments  for  a 
lesson  of  courage,  not  unnecessary  in  these  days 
of  anonymous  criticism,  and  much  light,  other- 
wise unattainable,  on  the  spirit  in  which  great 
movements  are  initiated  and  carried  on."  There 
are  some  natures  whom  we  can  only  help  by 
saying  not  simply,  Think  about  moral  goodness, 
but  Do  what  I  do,  and  God  will  be  with  you.  The 
God  of  peace  will  be  with  you;  you  will  be  at 
harmony  with  yourselves  and  with  your  surround- 
ings. That  is  much  more  than  a  primitive  lever 
of  education.  What  makes  us  often  hesitate  to 
use  it  is  not  so  much  a  feeling  of  modesty  as  a 
sense  of  the  patent  incongruity  between  our  belief 
and  our  conduct,  not  so  much  a  fear  of  subtle 
pride  as  a  consciousness  of  the  discrepancies 
which  might  render  the  lever  useless  and  ridicul- 
ous among  those  who  know  us  best. 

A  much  more  honourable  reason  for  hesitation 
is  the  fear  of  destroying  individuality  of  character. 
Strong  natures  like  Paul,  Calvin,  Loyola  and 
Wesley  have  been  often  charged  with  the 
ambition  of  casting  others  in  their  own  moulds 
and,  by  the  sheer  force  of  their  personalities,  of 
imposing  an  imperious  type  of  thought  or  practice 
on  their  associates.  This  is  a  real  danger.  Many 
people  are  content  to  submit  to  a  stronger  will 


n8  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

simply  because  it  saves  them  the  trouble  of  thought 
and  decision,  and  this  tempts  leaders  or  teachers 
to  aim  at  producing  echoes  rather  than  inde- 
pendent characters.  But  complete  deference, 
even  to  the  dominion  of  a  good  person,  is  a 
paralysis  of  the  soul.  The  Christian  character 
is  not  the  acceptance  of  correct  opinions  or  the 
practice  of  right  conduct,  in  imitation  even  of 
the  saintliest  and  wisest  of  our  acquaintance. 
"  Example,"  said  Burke,  "  is  the  school  of  man- 
kind, and  they  will  learn  at  no  other."  This  is 
not  so,  and  it  would  be  a  pity  if  it  were.  Example 
is  strong,  but  its  object  is  to  reveal  the  wide  and 
universal  truths  of  which  no  single  life,  however 
large  its  attainment,  can  be  the  perfect  embodi- 
ment. The  revelation  of  this  Life,  which  Jesus 
has  disclosed,  is  richer  than  the  most  gifted  and 
admirable  Christian  can  possibly  interpret  to  us. 
Paul  does  appeal  to  these  untrained  Christians  at 
Philippi  to  imitate  his  example,  and  learn  from 
him  how  to  love  as  Christians.  But  he  tells  them 
to  keep  their  minds  open  to  all  that  is  true  and 
just  and  pure  and  noble  in  life.  The  eighth  verse 
of  this  chapter  precedes  the  ninth,  deliberately. 
For  one  thing,  there  are  some  natures  which  are 
more  susceptible  to  ideas  and  principles  or  to 
tradition  than  to  living  persons.  For  another 
thing,  even  those  who  respond  to  the  influence  of 
a  great  character  need  to  be  reminded  that  the 
purpose  of  God  is  not  stereotyped  in  the  very 


THE   ONLY   SCHOOL?  119 

finest  lives  of  the  saints.  The  best  have  their 
limitations.  They  certainly  make  us  ashamed  of 
our  narrowness  and  indolence.  What  we  see  and 
admire  in  them,  the  Christlike  qualities  of  their 
example,  their  passion  for  truth,  their  integrity, 
their  moral  beauty,  their  calm  faith,  their  gener- 
osity— all  this  thrills  us  with  a  sense  of  what 
can  be  done  by  a  soul  responsive  to  the  Highest. 
We  feel  that  if  we  only  do  as  they  do,  and  copy 
them  even  faintly,  God  also  will  be  with  us;  and 
it  is  so.  Yet  these  examples  may  be  outgrown  in 
part.  Indeed,  they  point  us  steadily  beyond  them- 
selves. Over  and  above  them  there  is  a  larger 
region,  with  ampler  air,  in  which  we  are  also  sum- 
moned to  breathe,  to  think  for  ourselves,  and  to 
think  not  exclusively  on  this  type  or  that  of 
Christian  experience,  not  on  any  saint  or  hero  of 
the  faith,  lest  our  very  admiration  should  be  the 
means  of  crippling  our  moral  and  spiritual  growth, 
but  on  whatsoever  is  true  and  just  and  pure  and 
excellent. 


XIII 

FORGETTING    TO  PRAY 


God  fo7'bid  that  I  should  sin  against  the  Lord  in   ceasing  to 
Pray  f 07' you. — I   Sam.  xii.  23. 


XIII 

FORGETTING    TO  PRAY 

The  old  man  might  have  felt  aggrieved.  Israel 
had  resolved,  against  his  advice,  to  have  a  king, 
and  Samuel's  protest  had  been  overborne. 
Popular  feeling  demanded  a  change  of  organiza- 
tion in  order  to  meet  the  rising  needs  of  the  age, 
but  Samuel  clung  to  the  old  order  of  things,  and 
this  is  his  final,  dignified  address  to  the  people  on 
the  eve  of  the  new  departure.  It  is  instinct  with 
generous  and  unselfish  patriotism.  He  rises 
above  the  level  of  retort  and  personal  pique. 
Instead  of  venting  his  wounded  feelings,  he 
pleads  that  the  people  will  at  least  continue  to 
honour  God's  law  and  be  faithful  to  their  religious 
principles.  Turn  not  aside  from  following  the 
Lord,  but  serve  the  Lord  with  all  your  heart. 
For  the  Lord  will  not  forsake  his  feofle  for  his 
great  name's  sake.  Only  fear  the  Lord,  and 
serve  him  in  truth  with  all  your  heart:  for  con- 
sider how  great  things  he  hath  done  for  you.  As 
for  himself,  his  services  are  still  at  their  disposal. 
Moreover,  as  for  me,  God  forbid  that  I  should  sin 
against  the  Lord  in  ceasing  to  fray  for  you:  but 
I  will  instruct  you  in  the  good  and  right  way. 

123 


i24  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

These  words  are  more  than  magnanimous,  how- 
ever. Samuel  had  begun  his  speech  by  challeng- 
ing the  people  to  convict  him  of  any  abuse  of 
power  during  his  past  term  of  office.  He  ends 
by  disclaiming  any  sins  of  omission  in  the  future. 
God  forbid  that  I  should  sin  against  the  Lord  in 
ceasing  to  fray  for  you. 

Such  is  the  inwardness  of  a  genuine  faith. 
Some  sins  of  omission  are  due  to  ignorance,  but 
others  are  more  culpable — the  sins  of  people  who 
for  various  reasons  give  up  a  duty,  although  they 
know  better.  They  are  not  reckless  or  high- 
handed ;  they  simply  drop  the  old  task  or  practice. 
It  ceases  to  have  any  place  in  their  life.  And 
this,  as  Jesus  teaches,  is  more  blamable  than  the 
other  class  of  omissions.  That  servant  who  knew 
his  lord's  will  and  did  not  according  to  his  will, 
shall  be  beaten  with  many  strifes;  but  he  who 
knew  not,  and  did  things  worthy  of  strifes,  shall 
be  beaten  with  few  strifes.  Jesus  singles  out  for 
special  reprobation  those  sins  of  omission  which 
are  due,  not  to  moral  weakness  or  some  over- 
sight, not  to  ignorance  of  duty,  but  to  quiet  and 
deliberate  neglect.  It  is  bad  enough  to  be  guilty 
of  dulness  and  indolence,  but  He  is  thinking  and 
speaking  here  of  people  who  tacitly  allow  some 
of  their  divine  obligations  to  become  a  dead  letter. 

Sensitiveness  to  things  undone  is  a  mark  of 
real  maturity  in  our  religion.  "We  have  left 
undone  those  things  which  we  ought  to  have  done, 


FORGETTING   TO    PRAY  125 

and  we  have  done  those  things  which  we  ought 
not  to  have  done."  The  old  confession  not  only 
acknowledges  sins  of  omission,  but  puts  them 
before  sins  of  commission.  Whereas  the  average 
tendency  is  to  gloss  them  over.  And  why?  For 
one  thing,  because  many  of  them  hardly  alter  the 
exterior  of  life.  If  a  man  gives  up  the  habit  of 
intercessory  prayer,  for  example,  who  detects  it? 
The  offence  does  not  strike  at  the  visible  inter- 
ests of  the  Christian  society;  it  need  not  betray 
itself  by  any  glaring  breach  of  outward  conduct. 
Still,  this  inward  neglect  of  prayer  is  a  wrong 
done  to  God  and  to  himself  as  well  as  to  others. 
Any  one  may  tell  a  lie  without  opening  his  lips. 
By  his  very  silence  he  may  become  an  accomplice 
in  cruelty  or  falsehood.  And  by  simply  ceasing 
to  pray  for  others  a  man  may  be  as  culpable  in  the 
sight  of  God  as  if  he  had  defrauded  or  oppressed 
his  fellows.  To  him  who  knoweth  to  do  good  and 
doeth  it  not,  to  him  it  is  sin. 

Sooner  or  later  the  bystanders  notice  any 
failure  on  our  part  to  perform  our  social  duties, 
but  God  only  knows  whether  we  pray  for  our 
fellows  or  not.  Samuel's  prayers  were  doubtless 
part  of  his  public  work.  The  psalmist  reckons 
him  among  the  three  great  intercessors  for  Israel — 

Moses  and  Aaron  among  his  priests, 

Samuel  among  them  that  call  upon   his  name ; 

They  called  upon   God,  and  he  answered  them. 

But   while    these    official    duties   of    intercession 


126  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

might  have  been  performed,  it  is  also  true  that 
Samuel  could  have  continued  to  act  as  a.  religious 
adviser  to  Israel  without  praying  secretly  for 
them,  and  no  Israelite  would  have  been  a  whit  the 
wiser.  The  old  man  might  have  gone  in  and  out 
among  the  people,  discharging  what  we  call  his 
professional  religious  duties ;  but  none  need  have 
suspected  for  a  moment  that  he  had  given  up 
bearing  them  on  his  heart  before  God.  It  is 
possible  for  the  spirit  of  prayer  to  ebb  out  of  our 
religious  activities.  Those  who  are  beside  us  can- 
not overlook  our  private  devotions.  They  may 
be  unable  to  detect  any  perceptible  change  in  our 
behaviour  and  attitude;  and  yet  a  change  does 
creep  slowly  over  our  characters.  We  grow  less 
hearty  and  eager;  a  temper  of  impatience  and 
irritation  asserts  itself;  people  begin  to  notice  a 
difference  in  our  tone  which  they  can  more  readily 
feel  than  define,  an  unduly  critical  note  in  our 
words,  an  attitude  of  detachment  from  the  general 
body,  a  disposition  to  dwell  upon  our  rights  and 
wrongs.  They  may  be  puzzled  to  account  for  it; 
but,  if  they  only  knew,  it  is  simply  the  insidious 
result  of  ceasing  to  pray. 

"We  hardly  discover  a  sin,"  Donne  writes, 
"  when  it  is  but  an  omission  of  some  good,  and  no 
accusing  act."  This  is  the  worst  of  sins  of  omis- 
sion; they  elude  our  notice,  unless  our  conscience 
is  on  the  alert.  Where  do  we  begin  to  injure 
others?     Not  simply  by  open  acts  of  indifference 


FORGETTING   TO   PRAY  127 

or  selfishness,  but  deeper  down,  in  the  place  of 
intercession,  where  the  God  who  entrusts  us  to 
one  another  expects  each  of  us  to  bear  those  for 
whom  we  are  specially  responsible  in  the  arms  of 
our  faith  and  love.  God  hears  the  snapping  of 
the  cords,  when  a  human  soul  breaks  loose  from 
the  restraints  of  charity  and  service.  But  He  also 
hears,  what  no  one  else  hears,  the  dead  silence  of 
the  heart,  when  prayer  is  given  up.  It  is  a  vital 
sin,  and  one  of  those  which  only  the  mature  seem 
fully  to  recognize  as  vital.  "  In  my  younger 
years,"  Richard  Baxter  owned,  "my  trouble  for 
sin  was  most  about  my  actual  failings  in  thought, 
word,  or  action.  But  now  I  am  much  more 
troubled  for  inward  defects  and  omissions,  or 
want  of  the  vital  duties  or  graces  in  the  soul. 
These  wants  are  the  greatest  burden  of  my  life." 
Baxter,  like  Samuel,  was  well  up  in  years  when 
he  made  this  confession.  But  such  a  ripening- 
sense  of  personal  religion  need  not  be  reserved 
for  the  autumn  of  life.  The  fear  of  leaving  things 
undone,  and  especially  a  watchfulness  against  the 
neglect  of  prayer  upon  any  pretext,  is  a  cardinal 
factor  in  the  life  to  which  as  Christians  we  are 
summoned. 

"Oft  I  think  my  prayers 
Are  foolish,  feeble  things ;  for  Christ  is  good 
Whether  I  pray  or  not  .  .  .  and  then  I  stop 
And  feel  I  can  do  nought  towards  helping  men, 
Till  out  it  comes,  like  tears  that  will  not  hold, 
And  I  must  pray  again  for  all  the  world." 


128  REASONS    AND   REASONS 

The  impulse  belongs  to  our  deepest  experience 
as  believing  men.  Our  relations  to  our  circle  may 
be  prosaic  and  irritating  enough,  our  responsi- 
bilities more  or  less  informal.  But  none  of  us  is 
equal  to  them,  such  as  they  are,  unless  in  his  heart 
of  hearts  he  is  breathing  the  spirit  of  this  great 
word  :  God  forbid  that  I  should  sin  against  the 
Lord  in  ceasing  to  fray  for  you. 


XIV 

THE  ABUSE   OF  RELIGION 


But  whereunto  shall  I  liken  this  generation  ?      It  is  like  unto 
children  sitting  in  the  marketplaces.— Matt,  xi.  16. 


XIV 

THE  ABUSE    OF  RELIGION 

In  his  ode  on  Immortality  Wordsworth  has 
drawn  the  imitative,  imaginative  child.  Take 
him,  says  the  poet,  at  the  age  of  six — 

"  See  at  his  feet  some  little  plan  or  chart, 
Some  fragment  from  his  dream  of  human  life, 
Shaped  by  himself  with  newly-learned  art: 

A  wedding  or  a  festival, 

A  mourning  or  a  funeral; 
And  this  hath  now  his  heart, 
And  unto  this  he  frames  his  song ; 
But  it  will  not  be  long 
Ere  this  be  thrown  aside, 
And  with  new  joy  and  pride 
The  little  actor  cons  another  part, 

As  if  his  whole  vocation 

Were  endless  imitation." 

This  is  native  to  the  child's  health  and  charm, 
this  elastic  power  of  being  able  to  respond  quickly 
to  various  emotions  or  impressions.  But  what  is 
pretty  and  even  natural  in  childhood  may  be  a 
weakness  afterwards.  Make-believe  is  never  the 
staple  of  a  mature  life,  and  it  is  a  thin  character 
which  has  no  higher  vocation  than  reproducing 
K  2  131 


i32  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

indiscriminately  a  series  of  passing  phases  in 
religion  or  in  anything  else.  Jesus,  looking  at 
some  of  His  contemporaries  in  Galilee,  declared 
that  their  attitude  towards  the  gospel  reminded 
Him  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  children,  of 
children  at  play — and  at  play  in  the  market- 
places, where  serious  business  was  afoot.  Matters 
of  life  and  death  are  being  transacted  on  every 
side.  The  deepest  interests  of  men  and  women 
are  engaged.  But  what  is  it  all  to  the  children? 
They  play  on  at  their  games,  quite  unconcerned. 
Now  and  then  they  will  turn,  as  the  whim  takes 
them,  to  copy  the  gestures  of  a  marriage  proces- 
sion or  to  mimic  a  funeral;  but,  be  it  dance  or 
dirge,  they  remain  upon  the  outside,  strangers  to 
the  inward  reality  of  what  crosses  the  line  of  their 
vision.  You  Galileans,  said  Jesus,  are  as  childish. 
You  are  trifling  with  life  in  the  very  sphere  of 
serious  interests.  All  you  are  fit  to  do  is  to  play 
with  the  forms  and  phases  of  religion;  while 
earnest  people  are  putting  heart  and  soul  into  it, 
upon  its  sombre  or  its  joyful  side,  most  of  you 
are  simply  amusing  yourselves  with  it,  instead 
of  allowing  your  hearts  to  be  penetrated  by  its 
convictions  and  appeals. 

The  Galileans  were  a  volatile  and  dramatic 
race.  Josephus,  who  commanded  their  troops 
during  the  Jewish  war,  describes  how  he  fell  into 
sudden  disfavour  with  them,  and  how  the  people 
expressed  their  resentment  by  conducting  a  mock 


THE   ABUSE   OF   RELIGION  133 

funeral  of  himself  in  his  own  presence,  placing 
his  effigy  upon  a  gorgeous  bier,  and  going  gravely 
through  the  burial  ceremonies.  Jesus  marked  the 
same  sort  of  fickle,  imitative  tendencies  in  their 
treatment  of  Himself  and  John  the  Baptist. 
They  were  captious  and  careless.  Their  approval 
or  their  disapproval  was  practically  valueless  as 
evidence  of  deep  religious  feeling.  Religion  to 
them  amounted  to  an  entertainment  of  the  mind 
and  heart,  and  they  did  little  more  than  observe 
and,  when  it  pleased  them,  reproduce  the  religious 
movements  of  the  age,  without  any  intention  of 
committing  themselves  to  what  was,  after  all,  for 
them  no  more  than  a  new  part  to  be  conned  and 
dropped. 

Religion  is  abused  when  the  so-called  religious 
interest  becomes  censorious.  John  came  neither 
eating  nor  drinking,  and  they  say,  He  has  a  devil. 
The  Son  of  man  came  eating  and  drinking,  and 
they  say,  Here  is  a  glutton  and  a  wine-bibber,  a 
friend  of  tax-gatherers  and  sinners!  This  cen- 
sorious temper  Jesus  pronounced  simply  childish. 
What  disturbed  these  Galileans  was  not  John's 
austerity  nor  the  genial  tone  of  Jesus,  but  the 
divine  intensity  which  led  both  to  make  incon- 
venient demands  upon  fastidious  natures.  There 
are  people  who  can  always  find  some  plausible 
excuse  for  setting  aside  a  religious  appeal.  They 
show  a  perverted  ability  in  tabling  objections  to 
any  form  of  religion,  ascetic  or  otherwise,  which 


i34  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

impinges  on  their  aloofness.     What  they  really 

J  dislike  is  not  this  or  that  expression  of  religion; 
it  is  religion  itself.  A  man  may  have  puritan 
sympathies,  or  his  disposition  may  be  towards  the 
larger  and  more  catholic  aspects  of  the  faith.  One 
form  of  Christianity  may  seem  to  him  too  sensa- 
tional, another  too  formal ;  one  too  rigid,  another 
too  lax.  But  the  main  point  is,  does  he  want  any 
of  them?  And  the  danger  is  that  if  fault-finding 
is  indulged,  one  gets  into  the  way  of  being  child- 
;  ishly  determined  not  to  be  pleased  at  all,  and  of 
secretly  discovering  some  colourable  pretext  for 
declining  religion  altogether. 

Censoriousness  is  mainly  superficial,  but 
religion  is  abused  not  only  when  exception  is 
taken  to  features  which  are  for  the  most  part 
external,  but  also  when  attention  is  devoted  to 
such  elements.  Children  sitting  in  the  market- 
places call  to  their  companions  and  say,  We  piped 
to  you,  but  you  did  not  dance;  we  wailed,  but  you 
did  not  beat  your  breasts.  They  piped  and 
wailed,  but  their  impressionable,  petulant  natures 
experienced  no  strain  in  passing  from  one  whim 
to  another.  It  was  imitation,  not  experience,  and 
the  imitation  cost  them  nothing.  Many  a  Pharisee 
could,  and  perhaps  did,  affect  the  behaviour  of 
John.  Many  an  impressionable  Galilean  could 
copy  the  outward  demeanour  of  Jesus.  But  in 
either  case  it  was  a  piece  of  play-acting,  and  it  is 
so  still.      People  can  discuss  and  compare  the 


THE   ABUSE   OF   RELIGION  135 

varieties  of  religion,  to  their  heart's  content;  they 
may  be  able  to  repeat  its  language,  and  to  repro- 
duce some  of  its  phases,  even  to  proselytize  on 
behalf  of  their  particular  form.  Yet,  in  many  in- 
stances, it  is  perfectly  obvious  to  any  one  who  is 
inside  that  this  is  simply  trifling  with  the  surface. 
The  result  is  that  religion  is  further  abused  by 
being  treated  sentimentally.  Some  years  ago  one 
of  our  Indian  civil  servants  described  the  average 
Filipino  as  a  moral  wreck,  "  light-minded,  easily 
caught  by  glitter  and  show,  as  irrational  and  incon- 
sequent as  a  child."  A  Roman  Catholic,  "he 
knows  little  or  nothing  of  the  faith  to  which  he 
nominally  belongs,  but  he  hates  and  despises  all 
others.  The  laws  of  his  Church  are  exacting,  but 
they  do  not  trouble  him  at  all,  for  unless  he  be 
stretched  upon  his  deathbed  and  beset  with  super- 
stitious fears,  he  can  very  rarely  summon  the 
energy  necessary  to  obey  them.  He  delights  in 
feast-days,  because  they  appeal  to  his  sense  of 
glitter,  and  afford  him  opportunities  for  outbursts 
of  the  appalling  music  of  which  he  is  passionately 
fond."  This  analysis  of  the  Filipino's  religion 
recalls  the  childish  Galilean  temperament  of 
which  Jesus  speaks.  Even  when  the  Galileans 
did  imitate  John  or  Jesus,  they  were  like  children. 
A  child's  emotions  are  easily  stirred.  These 
Oriental  boys  and  girls  could  throw  themselves 
hysterically  into  the  sport  of  mimicking  a  funeral 
or  a  wedding,  with  all  the  gravity  of  a  child's 


136  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

ardent  imagination.  Their  little  faces  would 
grow  hot  and  bright;  their  words  would  ring  out 
clearly;  their  very  gestures  would  be  quite  in 
keeping  with  the  play.  But,  when  all  was  said 
and  done,  the  matter  got  no  further  than  their 
feelings. 

The  gift  of  being  impressed  is  always  valuable ; 
still  there  is  no  moral  value  in  being  content  to 
feel  moved,  and  to  let  that  be  all.  Jesus  has  only 
sorrowful  indignation  for  the  aesthetic  or  emo- 
tional appreciation  of  the  gospel,  which  is  im- 
patient of  any  searching  and  thorough  discipline 
for  the  will.  How  can  there  be  any  religion  without 
the  willingness  to  come  under  definite  obligations 
to  God?  To  be  sentimental,  according  to  George 
Meredith,  is  to  enjoy  without  incurring  obligation, 
and  in  the  sphere  of  Christian  experience  this 
means  to  mistake  self-gratification  for  moral 
passion,  to  amuse  the  intellect  with  convictions  on 
which  we  have  no  serious  intention  of  acting,  and 
covertly  to  admire  ourselves  for  our  religious 
emotions  and  aspirations.  To  treat  the  gospel 
thus  is  to  abuse  it.  There  is  a  fatal  tendency  to 
stop  short  with  the  theory  of  some  religious  belief, 
as  if  that  absolved  us  from  the  need  of  going 
any  further.  And  on  the  emotional  side,  the  danger 
is  even  more  obvious.  Discussion  for  discus- 
sion's sake,  feeling  for  feeling's  sake — that  is 
what,  with  unconscion~  ;r*rvrrcnce,  we  often 
allow  to  determine  our  relations  with  religion.     It 


THE   ABUSE    OF   RELIGION  137 

corrupts  reason  and  emotion  alike,  and  it  inter- 
poses a  barrier  of  unreality  between  the  soul  and 
Christ. 

The  levity  with  which  people  will  accept  the 
gospel  is  sometimes  more  astounding  than  the 
levity  with  which  they  permit  themselves  to  dis- 
miss it.  Their  reasons  for  devotion  are  at  times 
even  more  undesirable  than  their  pleas  for  in- 
credulity. And  yet,  if  our  connection  with 
Christianity  is  nothing  better  than  a  mixture  of 
captious  criticism  and  transient  enthusiasm,  with 
a  dash  of  graceful  posing  thrown  in,  we  are  in 
danger,  like  these  Galileans,  of  just  playing  with 
Christ's  religion — playing,  too,  in  the  marketplace, 
surrounded  by  the  realities  of  life  and  death, 
where  business  has  to  be  done  with  God.  The 
grace  and  gospel  of  Jesus  are  too  serious  to  be 
thus  trifled  with.  Their  genius  and  office  are  not 
to  be  profaned  by  aesthetic  handling  either  in  the 
pulpit  or  in  the  pew.  Whatever  we  do  with  them, 
there  is  one  thing  that  we  dare  not  do,  and  that 
is  to  persist  in  treating  them  as  if  they  represented 
a  phase  or  fashion  of  the  age  which  we  are  at 
liberty  to  take  up  and  to  lay  down  at  pleasure. 


XV 

THE   UNREADY  GUEST 


Friend,    how   earnest    thou   in  hither    not  having  a   wedding 
garment? — Matt.  xxii.  12. 


XV 

THE    UNREADY  GUEST 

Communion  with  God  has  rarely  been  reckoned 
an  easy  thing.  In  primitive  religion  it  was  usually 
bound  up  with  the  belief  that  some  rite  must  be 
carefully  performed,  or  some  gift  duly  offered,  by 
the  participant.  For  all  its  limitations  and  extrava- 
gances, sacrifice  stamped  this  elementary  sense  of 
requirement  upon  the  conscience  of  the  human 
race.  The  ritual  of  the  altar  was  not  invariably 
favourable  to  spirituality,  or  even  to  morality,  but 
it  had  the  virtue  of  maintaining  upon  the  whole  a 
widespread  conviction  that  kinship  with  God  was 
not  a  matter-of-fact  relation  which  required  no 
special  effort  from  men. 

With  the  change  of  the  centre  of  gravity  from 
ritual  to  spirit  came  a  new  peril — or,  at  least,  a 
new  phase  of  moral  peril — that  of  slackness  and 
presumption.  The  very  inwardness  of  the  gospel 
was  made  to  justify  an  easy-going  temper.  The 
abolition  of  outward  sacrifices  by  Jesus  Christ 
tended,  in  some  natures,  to  relax  the  need  of 
reverent  care  and  thought,  especially  as  the 
requirements  were  now  shifted  to  the  sphere  of 

141 


i42  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

the  will  and  conscience,  where  self-deception  is 
much  more  easy  than  in  the  punctilious  discharge 
of  ritual  or  routine.  Men  often  forget  that  the 
more  inward  a  demand  becomes,  the  keener  is  its 
edge.  It  is  harder  to  make  sure  of  truth  in  the 
inward  parts  and  of  moral  purity,  than  to  offer 
the  requisite  number  of  animals,  or  to  go  on  a 
pilgrimage.  We  may  deceive  ourselves  about  the 
one  class  of  requirements;  we  cannot  about  the 
other.  Thus,  while  the  first  difficulty  of  the 
gospel  is  to  be  taken  at  all,  the  next  is  to  be  taken 
seriously,  upon  the  terms  and  conditions  of  God 
Himself. 

Jesus  anticipated  this  danger.  Or  rather,  He 
found  it  already  among  some  of  his  contempo- 
raries. He  spoke  this  little  parable  to  people  who 
were  prone  to  be  cool  and  complacent  in  their  new 
attitude  towards  God.  The  kingdom  of  heaven 
is  like  a  king  who  made  a  marriage  feast  for  his 
son.  .  .  .  And  when  he  went  in  to  see  his  guests,  he 
saw  there  a  man  who  had  not  on  a  wedding 
garment. 

(i)  The  unready  guest,  in  this  word-picture,  is 
often  the  dull  man.  He  believes  in  God;  but,  as 
Froude  says  somewhere  of  Sir  Robert  Cecil,  "  he 
believes  in  God  in  a  commonplace  kind  of  way." 
His  faith  makes  no  great  alteration  in  his  views 
or  habits.  He  is  fairly  well  satisfied  with  himself, 
and  he  finds  it  hard  to  conceive  how  God  can  be 


THE   UNREADY   GUEST  143 

otherwise.  To  every  one  else  the  contrast  between 
him  and  his  religious  profession  is  patent.  But 
he  does  not  see  it,  and  he  would  resent  any  sug- 
gestion of  it  from  his  fellow-worshippers. 

Upon  natures  of  this  type  the  cost  and  care 
with  which  God  makes  the  offer  of  fellowship 
real,  seem  to  be  thrown  away.  Jesus  brings  this 
out  explicitly  in  the  parable.  The  thrice  renewed 
invitation,  the  preparations  in  the  house,  and  so 
forth — all  these  set  out  the  heartiness  of  God's 
welcome.  But  a  dull  faith  remains  untouched. 
The  unready  guest  is  one  who  does  not  perceive 
any  need  of  a  corresponding  effort  upon  his  part 
to  reset  his  ideas  and  rearrange  his  habits.  And 
that  is  why  he  finds  himself  outside  the  secret. 
For  no  one  need  expect  to  enter  into  the  fellow- 
ship of  Christ  out  of  mere  good-nature  or  affability. 

Wherewith  shall  I  come  before  the  Lord,  and 
bow  myself  before  the  high  God  ?  The  prophet's 
deep  answer  was  :  He  hath  shewed  thee,  O  man, 
what  is  good;  and  what  doth  the  Lord  require  of 
thee,  but  to  do  justly,  and  love  mercy,  and  to 
walk  humbly  with  thy  God?  It  is  something  to 
feel  that  God  requires  anything  from  His 
worshippers.  But  we  are  not  left  to  our  unaided 
efforts,  to  whet  the  conscience  for  this  service. 
Reverence  cannot  be  worked  up  by  ourselves.  We 
need  to  look  outside  and  above  our  lives,  if  we 
are  to  be  inspired  and  subdued.     God  shows  us 


i44  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

what  is  good.    And  in  this  parable  of  Jesus  His 
requirement  is  pressed  upon  man  from  two  sides. 
A  certain  king  made  a  feast.  .  .  .  And  when  he 
went  in  to  see  his  guests,  he  said,  Friend.     The 
magnificence    of     God's    relation    to    ourselves 
should  impress  the  conscience.  To  be  a  Christian, 
to  have  access  to  God,  is  a  royal  privilege.    There 
is  a  splendour  in  faith,  a  moral  grandeur  in  our 
approach  to  God,  which  should  forbid  any  non- 
chalant airs  and  undue  familiarity.    And  then  there 
is  the  gracious,  personal  affection  of  it :  the  king 
said,  Friend.     Such  is  the  footing  of  intimacy 
upon  which  God  desires  to  place  us;  His  aim  is 
to  be  on  the  closest  terms  with  those  whom  He 
has  called  and  chosen.     Thus  by  the  sovereignty 
of  our  faith,  and  by  the  tenderness  of  Him  who 
has   thought   nothing   too   good   for  us,   we   are 
meant  to  be  roused  from  slovenliness  and  irrever- 
ence, asking,  What  doth  the  Lord  require  of  me  ? 
What  rearrangement  of  my  life  does  He  demand  ? 
(2)  The  unready  guest  may  be  also  the  frivol- 
ous man.    Friend,  how  earnest  thou  in  hither  not 
having    (as    thou    art    well    aware)    a    wedding 
garment  f    This  is  not  the  frivolity  of  deliberate 
irreverence  but  of  graceful  unconcern,  and  it  is 
more  subtle  than  the  temper  of  dulness.    It  is  the 
special   temptation   of   those   who   find   religious 
privileges  coming  round  to  them  in  the  course  of 
the  Church's  year,  but  who  accept  them  without 


THE   UNREADY  GUEST  145 

any  throb  of  personal  concern.  They  are  per- 
fectly aware  of  this,  but  they  do  not  think  it 
matters  very  much.  "  It  is  a  seemly  and  social 
act,"  they  reflect — if  they  reflect  at  all;  "this  is 
expected  of  a  man  in  my  position." 

Is  it  any  wonder  that  such  conventional  and 
superficial  approaches  to  God  prove  disappoint- 
ing ?  There  is  no  meeting  between  Christ  and  the 
soul  which  feels  that  it  could  get  on  without  Him, 
should  things  so  fall  out.  Jesus  is  known  as  He 
is  needed,  not  otherwise.  The  self-satisfied  guest 
who  strolls  in  to  the  feast  with  an  off-hand  air,  in 
a  spirit  of  idle  curiosity  or  social  deference,  knows 
nothing  of  its  inner  meaning.  Communion  meets 
us  with  God's  desire  deep  in  the  heart  of  it;  and 
it  needs  our  desire,  if  anything  satisfactory  is  to 
come  of  it. 

(3)  Finally,  the  unready  guest  may  be  the 
suspicious  man.  We  often  fail  because  we  don't 
feel  any  difference  between  ourselves  and  God, 
or  because  we  lack  personal  desire  for  Him;  and 
again,  because  we  have  no  devotion  to  Him.  The 
suspicious  man  hesitates  to  commit  himself.  If 
he  were  to  put  on  the  wedding  robe,  he  would 
stamp  himself  as  pledged  to  the  consequences. 
And  he  is  not  prepared  for  that  just  yet.  He  is 
reluctant  to  go  all  the  way.  Until  he  is  perfectly 
satisfied  that  the  feast  is  a  fact,  and  the  invita- 
tion genuine,  he  considers  it  prudent  to  run  no 


i46  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

risk   of   being   made   to   look   uncomfortable   or 
undignified. 

Many  years  ago  Sir  Edwin  Arnold  described 
the  attitude  of  the  Japanese  towards  the  super- 
natural as  one  of  "politeness  towards  possi- 
bilities." A  faith  of  that  kind,  though  faith  is  too 
fine  a  term  for  it,  will  never  carry  life  into  deep 
and  satisfying  convictions.  Whoever  reached  the 
secret  of  Jesus,  cherishing  as  he  went  the  secret 
fear  that  it  might  turn  out  a  mistake?  Nothing 
can  shut  us  off  so  effectually  from  the  knowledge 
of  God  as  the  uneasy  suspicion  that  after  all 
our  religion  may  betray  us  into  foolishness  before 
the  outside  world,  or  compromise  our  dignity,  or 
leave  us  awkwardly  in  the  lurch.  We  must  meet 
God's  generous  welcome  in  Christ  with  a  venture 
of  the  whole  life.  It  must  be  all  or  nothing.  The 
doubtful  mind,  which  is  at  best  polite  towards  the 
possibilities  of  the  gospel,  which  never  lets  itself 
go  frankly,  which  is  ready  to  draw  back  in  the 
event  of  being  disappointed — that » mind  does  no 
justice  to  God;  it  remains  a  stranger  to  the  inward 
meaning  of  His  fellowship  and  to  the  reasons  of 
His  gracious  revelation. 

When  the  outward  setting  of  our  worship  seems 
to  promise  fellowship  between  God  and  ourselves, 
even  then  and  there  something  may  shut  us  out 
from  the  secret  of  the  Lord.  That  secret  is  with 
them  that  fear  Him,  with  the  reverent  spirit  which 


THE   UNREADY  GUEST  147 

is  sensitive  to  His  requirements.  If  the  revelation 
of  His  grace  stirs  any  sense  of  the  moral  differ- 
ence between  ourselves  and  Him,  if  it  elicits  an 
output  of  the  will,  then  only  may  we  hope  to  be 
His  guests  indeed,  to  enjoy  what  He  has  prepared 
for  those  who  love  Him,  to  enter  into  His  real 
presence — and  have  no  questions  asked. 


L  2 


XVI 

AFTERWARDS 


Now  no  chastening  for  the  present  seemeth  to  be  joyous,  but 
grievous :  nevertheless  afterward  it  yieldeth  the  peaceable  fruit  of 
righteousness  unto  them  which  are  exercised  thereby.  .  .  .  Ye  know 
how  that  afterward,  when  lie  would  have  inherited  the  blessing,  he 
was  rejected. — Heb.  xii.  n  and  17. 


XVI 

AFTERWARDS 

The  voice  of  the  present  does  count  for 
something,  but  it  is  not  everything.  A  prudent 
man  knows  that  what  happens  to  him  to-day  does 
not  stand  by  itself ;  it  has  consequences  stretching 
into  the  far  future,  and  the  measure  of  a  man's 
power  largely  depends  upon  his  ability  to  forecast 
the  issues  of  some  present  decision  or  experience, 
instead  of  surrendering  himself  to  the  wooing  of 
a  pleasure  or  the  stab  of  a  pain  as  if  nothing  else 
was  to  be  thought  of.  Both  do  seem  to  shut  out 
every  other  consideration.  The  gratification  of 
the  moment  may  dazzle  us,  till  we  are  blind  to 
the  consequences  of  our  indulgence,  just  as  trouble 
sometimes  engrosses  all  our  faculties.  We  may 
have  very  little  leisure,  and  still  less  liking,  to 
imagine  what  these  may  bring  in  far-off  autumns. 
Our  feelings  are  generally  short-sighted.  For  the 
time  being  it  is  difficult  to  look  past  them.  Yet 
we  dare  not  abandon  ourselves  to  them,  recklessly 
or  desperately,  as  if  this  experience  were  the 
be-all  and  end-all  of  things.  For  it  will  pass, 
leaving  us  different  people,  changed  for  better  or 

151 


152  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

for  worse,  according  as  we  have  behaved  our- 
selves in  the  sharp  crisis,  when  imperious  delights 
and  as  imperious  pains  demand  to  be  treated  as  if 
they  were  everything.  The  right  behaviour  is  to 
stop  and  reflect,  "  Yes,  this  may  be  very  well :  but 
— there  is  an  '  afterwards.'  " 

Short  views  are  wise,  in  trouble.  They  are  also 
essential  to  some  forms  of  heroic  self-sacrifice, 
when  we  must  not  stop  to  weigh  the  consequences 
to  ourselves.  But  there  are  passages  of  experience 
in  which  we  can  only  hope  to  see  our  way  clear 
by  letting  the  imagination  rise  to  look  over  the 
present  into  the  future. 

One  of  these  passages  is  the  discipline  of  trouble. 
Chastening  always  seems  for  the  moment  to  be 
vexatious^  instead  of  delightful:  but  afterwards 
those  who  have  gone  through  the  disconcerting 
process  find  that  it  has  ripened  their  characters. 
Chastening  is  not  simply  punishment  or  repres- 
sion. It  is  the  larger  process  of  moral  and  spiri- 
tual education  by  means  of  which  God  aims  to 
develop  our  nature  harmoniously.  Here,  as  else- 
where, education  involves  subjection  for  the  time 
being  to  some  unpleasant  and  irksome  experi- 
ences. But  these  do  not  come  by  accident  or 
arbitrarily.  There  is  a  reason  for  them.  They 
may  not  be  your  choice,  says  the  writer ;  still,  they 
are  chosen  for  you  wisely  and  kindly,  even  the 
privations  and  delays  and  hardships  which  are 
often  so  hard  to  bear  and  so  slow  to  clear.    When 


AFTERWARDS  153 

such  losses  and  crosses  check  us,  it  is  easy  to  let 
ourselves  be  ruffled  and  irritated.  Our  judgment 
tends  to  be  hasty;  we  may  blame  God  unfairly, 
and  doubt  His  good  faith.  But  the  remedy  for 
this  impatience  is  to  believe  that  He  is  slowly 
educating  us,  and  that  the  broad  purpose  He  has 
in  view  will  later  on  justify  the  upsetting  experi- 
ence of  to-day.  There  is  an  afterwards  as  well 
as  a  present  in  our  chastening,  and  the  one  grows 
out  of  the  other.  The  moment's  trouble  comes 
up  to  our  very  eyes  and  ears.  We  are  tempted  to 
be  engrossed  with  it,  as  if  it  were  the  climax, 
instead  of  being  only  a  part  of  the  divine  process. 
Chastening  always  seems  for  the  moment  to  be 
vexatious  :  but  afterward  it  yieldeth  fruit.  That 
is  the  clue  to  its  existence  for  us.  It  is  not  a 
stone  flung  ruthlessly  or  carelessly  upon  the  even 
tenor  of  your  ways.  It  is  a  seed — it  yieldeth  fruit. 
There  is  promise  of  ripeness  and  vitality  in  this 
strange  experience.  It  tears  up  the  surface  of 
life,  only  to  let  the  germs  of  higher  good  sink  into 
the  soil  and  win  a  better  chance  of  growth.  But 
you  must  recollect  that  between  the  dropping  of 
the  seed  and  the  plucking  of  the  fruit  cold  rains 
and  winds  will  intervene.  When  they  do  inter- 
vene, never  imagine  that  such  apparent  mishaps 
and  delays  are  God's  last  word  and  touch. 

The  sombre  aspect  of  this  truth  concerns  those 
who  trifle  with  consequences.  One  class  is 
tempted  to  say  about  discipline,  "  No  good  will 


i54  REASONS   AND    REASONS 

ever  come  of  this  " ;  the  other  class,  face  to  face 
with  self-indulgence,  reflect,  "  No  harm  will  come 
of  this."  The  objects  of  passion  sometimes  are 
so  vivid  and  fascinating  that  a  man  determines  to 
have  them,  come  what  may.  He  is  like  Esau  who 
for  a  single  mess  of  meat — for  the  red  pottage  that 
appealed  irresistibly  to  his  momentary  hunger — 
sold  his  own  birthright.  .  .  .  You  know  how  after- 
ward when  he  desired  to  inherit  the  blessing  he 
was  rejected.  Later  on,  such  natures  waken  to 
discover  that  they  have  lightly  bartered  away 
some  birthright  of  innocence  or  health  or  service 
which  cannot  be  recovered  by  any  passion  of 
regret. 

John  Stuart  Mill  says  that  his  father  considered 
the  majority  of  miscarriages  in  life  were  attribut- 
able to  the  overvaluing  of  pleasure.  It  is  a  plain 
fact,  at  any  rate,  that  men  and  women  are  capable 
of  shutting  their  eyes  to  all  considerations  of  the 
future,  in  order  to  gratify  the  sudden  passion  of 
the  moment.  They  lack '  self-control  largely 
because  they  lack  imagination.  They  have  no 
sense  of  perspective,  morally.  They  are  often 
charming  companions,  with  plenty  of  zest  and 
impulse ;  but  the  near  thing  is  generally  the  great 
thing  for  them,  and  to  secure  this  immediate, 
material  interest  they  will  not  hesitate  upon  occa- 
sion to  sacrifice  even  their  prospects  and  reputa- 
tion. People  do  that  over  and  over  again.  They 
do  not  even  say  they  will  take  the  risks.     Often 


AFTERWARDS  155 

they  will  not  believe  that  there  are  any  risks.  Well, 
they  get  their  red  pottage.  And  afterwards  f 
You  know,  says  the  writer,  what  happens  later  on. 
You  know  how  Esau  afterwards  was  rejected, 
when  he  would  fain  have  inherited  the  blessing. 
Passion  begins  by  arguing  that  there  is  no  harm 
in  letting  nature  have  its  swing.  It  is  blind, 
wilfully  blind,  to  any  afterwards.  And  then,  with 
jaded  appetite,  people  discover  that  the  argument 
failed  to  take  consequences  into  account,  and  that 
life  may  in  a  moment  part  with  some  possession 
which  neither  tears  nor  time  will  avail  to  restore. 
For  encouragement  and  for  warning,  therefore, 
we  are  bidden  hold  fast  to  the  perspective  which 
our  faith  supplies  to  life.  It  is  not  enough  even  to 
believe  vaguely  in  consequences.  Consequences 
are  not  always  what  we  expect.  What  seems  to 
promise  ample  and  secure  satisfaction  may  turn 
out  to  be  a  source  of  weakness  and  annoyance; 
what  appears  at  the  moment  to  be  nothing  but  a 
cruel  and  punishing  bit  of  experience  may  ripen 
into  a  moral  profit  which  we  would  have  been 
sorry  indeed  to  miss,  for  all  the  earlier  discomfort  it 
imposed.  Afterward  you  may  bitterly  regret  what 
you  said  or  did  in  a  moment  of  passion.  After- 
ward, also,  you  may  be  thankful  that  you  did  not 
break  down  under  some  trying  discipline  of  God, 
or  that  you  did  not  break  away  from  Him.  The 
point  is  to  believe  that  to-day  has  wider  issues 
than  are  visible  at  present.    And  that  is  one  service 


156  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

rendered  by  our  faith;  it  enables  us  to  keep  our 
heads  and  to  keep  our  ground,  when  the  nerves  or 
the  passions  of  life  threaten  to  master  us.  If  you 
ever  feel  almost  driven  to  let  everything  go,  think 
of  the  grey  afterward  that  follows  all  impatience, 
impatience  under  God's  trial  and  impatience  for 
a  taste  of  the  world's  pleasure. 


XVII 
THE    OPPORTUNITY  OF  THE  PROVINCIAL 


And  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  began  to  move  him  at  times  i?i  the 
camp  of  Dan  between  Zorah  and  Eshtaol. — JUDGES  xiii.  25. 


XVII 

THE   OPPORTUNITY  OF  THE  PROVINCIAL 

Before  the  young  lad  Samson  passed  out  to 
his  public  career  in  Israel,  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord, 
it  is  written,  began  to  move  him  at  times  in  the 
camp  of  Dan  between  Zorah  and  Eshtaol.  These 
movements  were  probably  freshets  of  the  wild 
passionate  tide  of  strength  which  afterwards  swept 
him  into  exploits  of  terror  and  chivalry  through- 
out the  country.  Zorah  and  Eshtaol  were  two 
country  towns  looking  down  on  the  inland  plateau 
that  ran  up  through  cornfields  and  vineyards  to 
the  central  hill-range  of  Judaea.  Travellers  speak 
warmly  of  the  fair  nursery  for  boyhood  afforded 
by  the  spot,  but  what  interests  the  historian  is  its 
confined  scope,  not  its  beauty.  It  is  the  restric- 
tions, and  not  the  scenery,  of  the  place  which 
appear  suggestive  to  him.  There,  even  there,  on 
a  limited  and  provincial  scale,  high  impulse  and 
divine  promptings  did  not  fail  to  touch  the  soul ; 
God's  purpose  did  not  wait  to  reach  Samson 
till  he  had  left  the  familiar  and  domestic  sphere 
behind  him.     Such  is  the  point  and  message  of 

the  words. 

159 


i6o  REASONS  AND   REASONS 

The  quiet  and  honourable  acceptance  of  a 
straitened  lot  seldom  is  in  fashion.  The  feeling 
of  rebellion  surges  up  not  only  in  the  young  but 
in  the  middle-aged,  wherever  life  is  tempted  to 
chafe  against  the  pettiness  of  circumstances  which 
appear  inadequate  to  its  just  powers  and  hopes. 
A  cry  goes  up  which,  according  to  the  individual's 
constitution,  is  a  moan  or  a  petulant  outburst. 
The  camp  of  Dan,  they  complain,  is  a  veritable 
prison;  nothing  great  or  divine  will  ever  come 
this  way,  and  it  is  idle  to  expect  it.  So  men  will 
speak  in  their  impatience,  forgetting  that  even 
slow  or  dull  surroundings  may  be  made  to  yield 
materials  to  the  thoughtful,  and  that  the  fault 
often  lies  with  the  person  as  much  as  with  the 
place.  Most  people  are  summoned  to  stay  for 
some  time  between  Zorah  and  Eshtaol.  The 
main  difference  in  such  natures  is  that  while  some 
see  nothing  but  the  narrowness  of  the  sphere, 
others  see  all  that  and  God  also  at  their  side. 
What  profits  it,  the  wise  reflect,  to  dash  with 
restive  soul  against  the  bars,  refusing  to  try  and 
make  anything  out  of  life  till  it  is  released  into  some 
more  romantic  and  appreciative  sphere  ?  "  Love," 
they  would  fain  repeat  to  each  other,  in  Andrea 
Del  Sarto's  words — 

"  Love,  we  are  in  God's  hand, 
How  strange  now  looks  the  life  He  makes  us  lead  ; 
So  free  we  seem,  so  fettered  fast  we  are ! 
I  feel  He  laid  the  fetter  :  let  it  lie." 


THE   OPPORTUNITY   OF  THE   PROVINCIAL     161 

Otherwise,  however  a  life  may  claim  our  sym- 
pathy, or  deserve,  in  a  small  degree,  its  own  self- 
pity  for  some  mistake  of  choice  or  perhaps  a 
thwarted  ambition,  it  is  missing  the  opportunity  of 
the  valley.  We  are  confusing  a  great  experience 
and  great  surroundings.  It  is  the  erroneous  idea, 
which  ought  not  to  survive  the  superficial  judg- 
ments of  our  youth,  that  a  golden  setting  is  re- 
quired for  high  careers.  A  moment's  reflection 
will  assure  us  that  some  of  the  finest  gifts  of 
example  and  inspiration  ever  presented  to  the 
world  have  emerged  from  lives  that  had  for  long, 
and  occasionally  to  the  very  end,  to  endure  a  lot 
of  comparative  restriction  and  obscurity.  At 
any  rate  it  is  never  any  mark  of  greatness  to 
despise  one's  surroundings.  "  Don't  allow  your- 
self," wrote  Jowett  to  Professor  Nichol  in  1864, 
"  don't  allow  yourself  to  become  that  most  miser- 
able and  contemptible  of  all  characters,  a  disap-; 
pointed  man."  It  argues  not  strength  but  weak- 
ness to  cherish  feelings  of  being  ill-used  or  over- 
looked, or  to  resent  a  provincial  sphere  as  if  it 
forbade  the  entrance  of  high  purpose  and  divine 
endeavour.  No  circle  is  mean  and  dull  if  its 
centre  is  found  in  God.  Between  Zorah  and 
Eshtaol  there  is  space  for  Him  to  begin  His  work, 
if  only  life  is  cleansed  from  the  acrid  poison  of 
complaint. 

Temporary  limitations  need  not  avail  to  restrict 
the  interests  of  life,  any  more  than  the  humblest 


i62  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

valley  shuts  off  its  inhabitants  from  the  pure  glory 
of  the  sky  and  the  ministry  of  the  seasons.  Men 
like  White  of  Selborne,  in  science,  for  example, 
have  risen  nobly  to  the  opportunity  of  the  pro- 
vincial. His  life  was  spent  in  one  of  the  flattest 
counties  in  England,  and  its  scope  was  never 
extensive;  yet  what  a  rich  use  he  made  of  his 
chances  of  observation !  James  Smetham,  the 
Wesleyan  artist,  is  another  case  in  point.  His 
Letters  form  a  treasury  of  counsels  on  this 
management  of  the  narrowed  sphere.  But  Millet 
is  perhaps  the  supreme  instance  of  a  rich  artistic 
nature  moved  to  expression  and  achievement 
amid  straitened  means  and  obscure  surroundings. 
The  unromantic  plot  of  country  round  Cherbourg, 
which  formed  his  early  sphere,  enabled  him  to 
enter  into  the  pathos  and  worth  of  labour,  simply 
because  he  was  sensible  enough  to  let  the  spirit 
of  beauty  thrill  and  inspire  him  for  the  interpre- 
tation of  that  peasant  life,  with  its  aching  sorrows 
and  piety  and  toil,  which  hemmed  him  in.  Too 
enamoured  of  his  mission  to  scorn  his  grey  lot, 
Millet  suffered  no  dreams  of  Paris  to  spoil  the 
real  opportunity  of  his  existence  in  the  French 
hamlets.  Between  his  Zorah  and  Eshtaol  he 
discovered,  that  his  genius  had  ample  room,  after 
all,  to  breathe  and  blossom. 

Much  of  our  repining  on  this  score  is  sheer 
foolishness !  People  think  it  fine  to  fling  out 
against  outward  repression  or  social  depression, 


THE   OPPORTUNITY   OF   THE   PROVINCIAL     163 

to  brood  over  thwarted  ambitions,  and  refuse  to 
do  anything  because   they  cannot  achieve  their 
cherished  dreams.     At  any  rate,  they  should  re- 
mind themselves,  God's  Spirit  can  always  make 
a  beginning.     One  does  not  require  to  go  to  the 
high  places  of  the  world  for  stimulus  to  kindness, 
sunny  temper,  truth,  mercy,  fidelity,  and  cheerful- 
ness.    Legitimate  ambition  is  one  thing ;  an  idle 
craving  for  fame  and  gain  is  another.     To  be 
contented  with  one's   limitations   may   denote   a 
moral  declension.    It  may  be  a  mark  of  littleness. 
But  it  need  not  be.    Often  it  is  a  note  of  genuine 
strength  and  of  self-restraint,  of  openness  to  that 
divine  Spirit  which  is  ever  finding  its  way  down 
into  humility  and  trust  and  patience,  the  Spirit 
which,   centuries  later  than   Samson,  in  another 
valley  north  of  that  hero's  home,  moved  One  to 
be  subject  to   His  parents,   and,   through   years 
which  were  neither  blank  nor  feeble,  to  grow  in 
obscurity,  but  also  in  favour  with  God  and  man.  , 
The  glory  of  human  life  lies,  after  all,  in  its  spirit,  I 
not    in    its    surroundings.     And    the    priceless 
qualities  of  trust  and  truth  can  be  cultivated  in  a 
quite  undistinguished  environment,   if  only  one 
keeps  the  narrow  fields  clear  of  hot  protest  and 
withering  grudges  against  God  and  man.    Within 
the  mean  enclosure,  between  Zorah  and  Esktaol, 
there  is  room  for  the  great  God.     The  time  may 
come  for  a  wider  sphere.     But  meanwhile  this 
experience    of    discipline    and    training    is    the 

M  2 


I 


1 64  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

stuff  out  of  which  God  chooses  to  fashion  men 
and  women  for  the  larger  lot.     The  efficiency  of 
^to-morrow  depends  on  the  cheerfulness  and  con- 
tentment of   to-day.      For  if   thoroughness,   un- 
selfishness, and  self-control  are  not  learnt  in  the 
earlier  stages  of  life,  they  are  seldom,  if  ever, 
-mastered  fully  afterwards. 

Perhaps  the  word  may  be  applied  even  further. 
Its  range  of  suggestion  is  wide  enough  to  cover 
the  case  of  human  lives  which  seem  to  miss  any 
adequate  sphere  in  the  present  world.  For  some 
people,  owing  to  sickness  or  to  misfortune,  exist- 
ence is  a  mere  camp  of  Dan  to  the  very  end,  in 
which  God  shows  only  the  beginnings  of  His 
power.  We  see  people  die  with  capacities  un- 
developed, with  interests  which  have  not  had  the 
chance  of  blossoming,  with  faculties  which  appear 
only  to  pass  away.  What  then?  There  are 
mysteries  and  tragedies,  God  knows.  They  con- 
front us  in  the  death  of  young  children  as  well  as 
of  older  people.  But  even  as  we  stand  perplexed 
over  them,  may  we  not  say,  without  straining  truth 
and  reverence,  that  a  faithful  use  of  the  little  here 
below  must  surely  qualify  for  fuller  growth  and 
service  somewhere  and  somehow  in  the  wider 
fields  of  God  ?  Such  is  faith's  argument  and  con- 
fidence. We  cling  to  the  reasonable  belief  that 
the  Spirit  which  could  but  move  life  here  to  mani- 
festations of  forbearance  and  courage  and  sub- 
mission amid  the  limitations  of  poverty  or  pain, 


THE    OPPORTUNITY   OF  THE   PROVINCIAL     165 

or  within  a  few  years  of  conscious  life,  will  not 
fail  to  continue  the  work  upon  a  larger  scale 
beyond  our  human  sight.  So  David  Gray  once 
ventured  to  hope,  himself  a  man  who — in  our 
phrase — never  came  to  his  own.  In  his  touching 
epitaph,  on  a  life  which  scarcely  managed  to  get 
past  its  early  promise,  he  wrote — 

"  Below  lies  one  whose  name  was  traced  in  sand. 
He  died,  not  knowing  what  it  was  to  live ; 
Died  while  the  first  sweet  consciousness  of  manhood 
And  maiden  thought  electrified  his  soul, 
Faint  beatings  in  the  calyx  of  the  rose. 
Bewildered  reader,  pass  without  a  sigh, 
In  a  proud  sorrow  !     There  is  life  with  God, 
In  other  kingdom  of  a  sweeter  air. 
In  Eden  every  flower  is  blown.     Amen." 

That  is  the  expression  of  a  brave  and  just  confid- 
ence in  God.  Between  Zorah  and  Eshtaol,  poor 
and  bare  as  the  soil  may  be,  faith  begins ;  the  soul 
buds;  character  shows  itself.  To  our  bewildered 
eyes  that  may  be  well-nigh  all.  The  rest — for 
there  must  be  some  further  growth — is  God's  con- 
cern. And,  after  His  beginnings  here,  "in  Eden 
every  flower  is  blown."    Amen,  and  Amen. 


\ 
\ 


XVIII 

FEAR   IN  THE   NIGHT 


Behold,  it  is  the  litter  of  Solomon; 

Threescore  mighty  men  are  about  it, 

Of  the  mighty  men  of  Israel. 

They  all  handle  the  sword,  a?id  a?e  expert  in  war 

Every  ma?i  hath  his  sword  upon  his  thigh, 

Because  of  fear  in  the  ?right. 

Song  of  Solomon  iii.  7,  8. 


XVIII 

FEAR  IN  THE  NIGHT 

What  a  vivid  glance  into  the  life  of  an  Oriental 
monarch  !  Round  Solomon's  palanquin,  decked 
with  the  luxury  of  the  East,  stand  sixty  chosen 
soldiers,  fully  armed,  in  order  to  ward  off  any 
nocturnal  attack.  The  king's  very  sleep  has  to 
be  protected  against  intrigues  and  conspiracies 
within  the  palace.  When  night  falls  it  brings  a 
peace  which  is  haunted  by  the  fear  of  assas- 
sination. 

The  uneasiness  of  the  head  that  wears  a  crown 
has  passed  into  a  proverb,  but  proverbs  are  more 
often  quoted  than  credited,  and  we  may  forget, 
in  our  envy  of  high  rank,  the  well-worn  story  of 
its  accompaniment.  Our  eyes  are  generally 
dazzled  by  the  glitter  of  wealth  and  position 
when  we  look  at  those  whose  life  seems  to  be  one 
round  of  pleasure,  apparently  unvisited  by  any  of 
the  swarming  cares  that  vex  our  lower  level.  It  is 
only  the  sensible  who  stop  to  reflect  that  no  suc- 
cess is  without  its  penalties.    The  brilliant  exterior 

often   covers  a  hidden   ache,   a  nervous   fear,   a 

169 


I 


170  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

weariness  that  gnaws  at  the  very  heart  of  life. 
Some  years  ago  an  English  journalist  commented 
upon  what  he  called  a  little  human  note  in  the 
magnificent  reception  accorded  King  Edward  at 
Kiel.  "The  King,"  he  said,  "looked  very 
pleased  at  his  reception,  but  it  was  the  subject  of 
general  remark  that  he  looked  pale  and  fatigued. 
It  is  always  thus  :  there  is  a  poor,  tired,  worried 
being  behind  all  the  show." 

The  recollection  of  what  is  behind  the  show 
might  help  to  make  us  more  considerate,  for  one 
thing.  Misery  does  not  always  vaunt  itself  in 
rags  and  tears.  There  may  be  some  secret  fear 
in  the  night  which  haunts  those  who,  in  our 
vicinity,  apparently  have  smooth  and  prosperous 
careers.  And,  for  another  thing,  we  might  learn 
to  be  more  contented  with  our  own  lot,  instead  of 
imagining  that  we  could  escape  troubles  by  get- 
ting away  to  the  high  shores  of  the  world  where  the 
tides  of  prosperity  run  brightly.  Such  positions 
are  often  won  at  the  expense  of  heart's  ease.  The 
common  sorrows  of  life  cannot  be  evaded  alto- 
gether by  the  brilliant  and  the  wealthy ;  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  some  of  them  strike  such  people  with  quite 
an  added  force. 

At  the  same  time,  it  is  not  by  accepting  an 
obscure  lot  or  by  reducing  our  ambitions  that 
we  can  escape  fear  in  the  night.  That  far-off 
Oriental  scene — the  palace  in  the  night  with  its 
unsleeping    body-guard — is    the    counterpart    of 


FEAR   IN   THE   NIGHT  171 

human  existence.  Many  people  who  know  no- 
thing about  palaces  know  what  it  is  to  be  kept 
awake  by  the  dread  of  the  nameless,  noiseless 
power  against  which  they  have  to  summon  a  host 
of  good  resolves  and  firm  beliefs.  Uneasiness 
about  our  health  or  prospects,  doubts  as  to  our 
usefulness  in  life,  anxiety  about  our  families  or 
about  our  ability  to  hold  out  against  temptation, 
these  and  countless  other  forms  of  evil  haunt  us, 
waking  or  sleeping.  What  are  God's  sentinels 
against  such  vexing  thoughts?  How  does  He 
strengthen  life  in  face  of  the  disturbing  elements 
in  its  environment? 

(1)  His  first  method  of  reinforcing  us  is  by 
assuring  us  of  the  value  of  the  soul.  That  is  a 
conviction  which  brings  its  own  peace  and 
strength.  Guards  are  set  round  what  is  precious, 
and  man's  first  line  of  defence  against  the  inroad 
of  fear  is  the  assurance  that  his  life  counts  with 
his  God,  and  counts  greatly,  even  although  he 
may  seem  to  be  numbered  among 

"  The  mere  uncounted  folk 
Of  whose  life  and  death  is  none 
Report  or  lamentation." 

This  faith,  which  underlies  all  religion,  is  a  moral 
stay  of  the  inward  life.     When  a  man  allows  him- 
self to  doubt  if  his  existence  matters  anything  at 
all,  he  lays  himself  open  to  depression  at  every   I 
turn.     As  the   sense  of  his  personal   destiny  is 


172  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

lowered,  his  sense  of  security  also  tends  to  dimin- 
ish. But  when  he  finds  that  God  has  honoured 
him  with  the  calling  and  career  of  faith,  he  realizes 
that  life  is  far  too  precious  to  be  left  at  the  mercy 
of  accident  or  impulse.  He  finds  a  reason  for 
thinking  of  himself  as  highly  as  he  ought  to  think. 
It  is  not  a  conviction,  remember,  which  wealth 
and  success  invariably  tend  to  deepen.  On  the 
contrary,  as  our  possessions  accumulate,  there  is 
a  danger  of  imagining  that  our  life  consists  in 
these,  instead  of  in  the  character  of  the  possessor. 
Whatever  be  our  lot  outwardly,  and  sometimes 
the  humbler  it  is  the  better,  we  must  learn  that 
God  trusts  us  with  life,  that  we  are  responsible  to 
Him  for  this  royal  gift  of  personality,  and  that 
He  in  turn  is  responsible  for  us.  We  must  recog- 
nize, in  the  light  of  Jesus,  that  it  is  not  a  matter 
of  indifference  what  we  make  of  ourselves.  God 
cares  for  character  supremely.  We  are  born  to  a 
lordship  of  the  spirit  over  the  natural  order,  and 
it  is  by  the  conviction  of  this  destiny  and  high 
calling  that  we  become  more  watchful  and  calm 
and  strong.  No  guard  of  high  resolves  and 
steady  faith  surrounds  the  man  who  is  simply 
living  for  appearances  and  selfish  ends.  Trifling 
with  character  lowers  our  faith  in  human  nature, 
in  our  own  as  well  as  in  other  people's.  But  when 
we  take  life  on  God's  high  terms,  faith  breathes 
into  us  a  new  dignity  and  self-possession;  we 
become  conscious  of  our  personal  worth  to  God 


FEAR   IN   THE   NIGHT  173 

amid  the  changes  and  chances  of  the  world;  we 
are  steadied  by  the  revelation  that  the  meaning 
of  life's  discipline  is  the  growth  of  our  souls  into 
the  likeness  and  the  mind  of  Christ.  He  has  an 
eternal  purpose  for  us  mortals,  for  each  and  all 
of  us.  In  the  thought  of  that,  guaranteed  by  the 
life  which  Jesus  has  revealed  and  which  He  lives 
to  realize,  we  can  take  refuge  from  disturbing 
fears  about  our  future. 

(2)  Another  sentry  stands  armed  before  the  f 
chamber  of  the  soul :  it  is  the  instinct  of  danger.  ; 
The  sense  of  its  own  value  prompts  life  intuitively 
to  protect  itself  against  peril.  Our  moral  being 
seems  to  have  a  mysterious  shrinking  from  tempt- 
ation, which  corresponds  to  the  instinct  that  makes 
insects  avoid  contact  with  certain  plants  or 
animals.  The  innocent  heart  recoils  at  a  touch 
of  coarseness.  Conscience  warns,  or  rather  it  fore- 
warns us  against  compromising  associations,  and 
the  lurking  sense  of  discomfort  in  certain  pursuits 
or  pleasures  is  often  a  wise  movement  of  nature, 
not  a  mere  caprice  of  dislike.  "  It  is  one  great 
security  against  sin,"  as  Newman  said,  "to  be 
shocked  at  it."  No  doubt  it  is  an  instinct  of 
repulsion  which  we  may  easily  kill.  But  if  we 
do  harden  ourselves  to  compromise  with  moral 
evil  or  to  scoff  at  sin,  the  soul  is  left  a  prey  to 
fear,  and  to  worse  than  fear.  To  lose  the  sense 
of  being  ashamed  at  what  once  made  us  uneasy, 
is  not  a  proof  of  moral  strength ;  it  is  no  evidence 


174 


REASONS   AND   REASONS 


of  safety  to  become  indifferent  to  what  we  are 
now  pleased  to  dismiss  as  idle  scruples  and  out- 
worn prejudices.  Moral  purity  and  power  are 
not  ensured  by  any  such  hardening  of  conscience. 
What  they  need  is  a  sensitiveness  to  evil,  a 
jealous  care  of  all  that  is  clean  and  true  and 
honourable,  and  a  delicate  regard  for  the  sanc- 
tities and  courtesies  of  life.  It  ought  to  be  as 
natural  for  us  in  the  spiritual  as  in  the  physical 
life  to  suspect  and  shrink  from  what  would 
injure  us.  Such  vague  antipathies  and  aversions 
may  sometimes  be  due  to  narrow  training  or  to 
unenlightened  prejudice,  but  they  are  often 
part  of  the  defensive  power  granted  by  God 
to  the  human  soul  in  a  world  where  life  is 
repeatedly  surrounded  by  spurious  and  con- 
taminating influences.  We  tamper  with  them  at 
our  peril. 

(3)  Finally,  there  is  a  safeguard  of  life  in 
obedience  to  the  will  of  God.  "  In  His  will  is 
our  peace,"  in  knowing  it,  in  doing  it,  and  in 
bearing  it.  Restlessness  is  sometimes  due  to  the 
secret  feeling  that  we  are  following  our  own  bent. 
And  there  is  no  peace  for  the  wilful  or  the  way- 
ward. As  soon  as  we  sit  loose  to  any  of  the  duties 
in  which  the  will  of  God  meets  us,  the  inward  life 
becomes  unsettled;  it  is  a  breach  of  harmony 
with  the  ruling  purpose  of  our  world,  and  through 
the  breach  excitement  and  unsteadiness  creep  in. 
When  people  are  constantly  on  the  outlook  for 


FEAR   IN   THE   NIGHT  175 

self-gratification,  whether  their  pleasures  are 
refined  or  low,  when  they  clutch  at  all  that  comes 
their  way  and  fret  when  they  miss  it,  when  their 
chief  thought  is  about  their  own  rights  and  wishes, 
it  is  no  wonder  that  this  self-will  dissipates  their 
inward  peace  of  mind.  Restlessness  is  the  in- 
evitable result  of  depending  upon  external  things 
like  popularity  or  ambition  for  the  interests  of 
life.  It  is  duty  that  steadies  us.  The  surrendered 
will  enters  into  the  quiet  strength  of  God's  will 
as  a  will  of  goodness  and  love.  It  is  a  peace  to 
know  that,  whatever  comes,  we  are  where  He 
meant  us  to  be.  This  consciousness  puts  mean- 
ing and  strong  hope  into  our  hearts  as  nothing 
else  can  do.  Peace  I  leave  with  you;  my  feace  I 
give  unto  you,  said  Jesus  on  his  last  evening. 
He  could  say  that,  because  He  could  also  say  : 
As  the  Father  gave  me  commandment,  even  so 
I  do. 

Be  our  circumstances  or  surroundings,  there- 
fore, what  they  may,  here  are  the  safeguards  of 
the  soul,  within  reach  of  the  humblest  and  indis- 
pensable to  the  strongest  and  most  fortunate. 
For  the  threshold  of  fear  can  be  crossed  so  easily  ! 
Harassing  care  and  dread  can  thrust  their  way 
in,  no  matter  what  is  our  age  or  income  or  posi- 
tion. And  where  is  our  defence,  where  but  in 
God's  faith  and  faithfulness,  worked  into  the 
moral  experience  of  those  who  keep  in  touch  with 
the  realities  of  His  life? 


1 76  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

11  It  lies  not  on  the  sunlit  hill 
Nor  on  the  sunlit  plain : 
Nor  ever  on  any  running  stream, 
Nor  on  the  unclouded  main. — 

But  sometimes  through  the  soul  of  man, 

Slow  moving  o'er  his  pain, 
The  moonlight  of  a  perfect  peace 

Floods  heart  and  brain." 

Moods  of  relief  and  quiet  come  thus.  But  not 
the  deeper  peace  of  God.  These  sentinels  of  life 
— faith  in  the  supreme  value  of  the  human  soul, 
the  instinct  of  danger  vouchsafed  to  the  pure,  and 
obedience  to  duty  as  God's  will — these  three 
stand  constantly  as  the  strong  and  quiet  watchers 
of  the  threshold;  while  inside  you  and  I,  God's 
servants  and  children,  can  lie  down  and  rise  up, 
comparatively  serene  and  cheerful,  knowing  that, 
once  our  requests  are  made  known  to  Him,  once 
our  lives  thus  face  Him  humbly  and  trust  Him 
with  themselves,  the  peace  of  God  which  passe th 
all  understanding  shall  guard  our  hearts  and  our 
thoughts  in  Christ  fesus. 


XIX 

THE    COMPENSATIONS   OF  GOD 


Without  were  fightings,  within  were  fears.  Nevertheless  he 
that  comforteth  the  lowly,  even  God,  comforted  us  by  the  coming  of 
Titus.— -2  Cor.  vii.  5,  6. 


XIX 

THE    COMPENSATIONS   OF  GOD 

Paul  was  tossing  on  a  broken  sea  of  troubles 
at  this  moment.  Not  long  before  he  had  been 
driven  out  of  Ephesus  by  a  riot,  and  obliged  to 
leave  the  local  Christians  in  a  crisis.  He  was  now 
anxiously  waiting  in  Macedonia  for  the  return  of 
Titus  from  a  mission  to  the  Corinthian  Church, 
where  some  Christians  had  been  misconducting 
themselves.  Without  were  fightings — external 
attacks  upon  himself  and  the  Churches;  within 
were  fears — concern  and  heaviness  about  the  faith 
and  behaviour  of  Christians  for  whom  he  felt 
responsible,  especially  about  those  in  the  south. 
Paul  found  the  strain  of  waiting  for  his  envoy 
almost  intolerable.  But  one  day  Titus  arrived 
with  good  news  about  the  Corinthian  Church,  and 
the  apostle's  depression  was  instantly  changed 
into  relief  and  cheerfulness. 

What  enabled  him  to  ride  out  the  storm?  Well, 
he  was  fast  to  three  anchors. 

(i)  He  seems  to  have  been  turning  over  one  of 
his  favourite  chapters  in  the  Old  Testament.  The 
phrase,  He  that  comforteth  the  lowly,  shows  inci- 
n  2  179 


i8o  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

dentally  where  he  had  been  looking  for  courage 
during  the  period  of  strain.  It  is  a  quotation  from 
the  forty-ninth  chapter  of  Isaiah,  and  that  chapter 
was  one  of  Paul's  favourite  passages.  He 
evidently  had  it  almost  by  heart.  In  the  previous 
chapter  he  had  already  quoted  the  eighth  verse  : 
At  an  acceptable  time  I  hearkened  to  thee,  and  in 
a  day  of  salvation  did  I  succour  thee.  In  the  great 
scene  at  Antioch,  where  he  turned  to  the  Gentiles, 
he  is  reported  by  Luke  to  have  defended  himself 
by  citing  the  sixth  verse  :  /  have  set  thee  for  a 
light  to  the  Gentiles,  that  thou  shouldest  be  for 
salvation  to  the  ends  of  the  earth.  Several  other 
echoes  of  the  chapter  are  to  be  heard  throughout 
Paul's  letters,  and  the  reference  here  suggests  that 
the  phrases  of  it  clung  to  his  mind  during  the  time 
of  anxiety  which  had  now  closed.  Probably  he 
valued  the  chapter  on  account  of  its  stress  upon 
the  freedom  of  the  gospel  for  the  nations.  But 
what  further  attracted  him  was  the  fact  that  this 
was  a  chapter  of  encouragement  for  people  who 
were  tempted  to  fear  that  their  work  for  God  had 
proved  a  failure. 

Here,  then,  is  one  means  of  holding  ourselves 
open  to  receive  God's  compensations.  When  our 
surroundings  are  dumb  and  contrary,  we  can  turn 
to  God's  Word.  It  is  part  of  our  equipment  for 
the  Christian  service  and  experience  to  know  our 
way  to  the  great,  calm  passages  of  the  Bible.  You 
should  have  your  favourite  chapters  or  psalms, 


THE   COMPENSATIONS   OF  GOD  181 

and  you  should  have  them  by  heart.  There  are 
times  when  you  may  have  little  else  to  fall  back 
upon,  for  the  rallying  of  your  faith. 

(2)  Unselfishness  is  another  safeguard.  Sym- 
pathy with  other  people  may  often  seem  to  carry 
in  its  train  more  discomfort  than  pleasure.  Those 
who  are  sensitive  to  the  needs  and  errors  of  their 
fellow-men,  and  who  endeavour  to  interest  them- 
selves in  people  who  have  any  claim  on  them, 
suffer  more  than  if  they  were  content  to  be  self- 
centred  and  indifferent.  A  genuine  desire  to  help 
others  is  sure  to  bring  pain  and  worry  upon  the 
unselfish ;  their  feelings  are  sometimes  harrowed 
by  the  sight  of  what  men  have  to  endure,  and  their 
very  efforts  to  redress  the  wrongs  and  ameliorate 
the  suffering  may  expose  them  only  to  unmerited 
ingratitude  and  even  misconception.  Yet,  if  they 
lay  themselves  open  to  anxieties  and  annoyances, 
they  get  compensations  infinitely  richer  than  the 
selfish  ever  dream  of.  Paul  was  thrilled  by  the 
good  news  from  Corinth.  The  better  resolves  of 
his  friends  there  sent  a  glow  of  unselfish  pleasure 
to  his  heart.  It  was  his  keen  sense  of  responsibility 
for  them  which  had  occasioned  him  these  hours 
of  distress,  and  it  was  through  the  same  feeling, 
which  knit  him  to  their  interests,  that  the  new 
happiness  arrived.  There  are  people  who,  as  far 
as  possible,  deliberately  avoid  interesting  them- 
selves in  others  and  forming  ties  of  responsibility, 
simply  because  they  shrink  from  the  worries  and 


i82  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

expense  which  they  anticipate  will  ensue  from 
such  associations.  It  is  sometimes  feasible  to 
safeguard  life  by  restricting  it  in  this  way.  But 
the  cultivation  of  an  easy  unconcern  shuts  out  also 
the  finer  joys  which  we  cannot  have  apart  from 
the  fuller  and  heavier  responsibilities.  There  are 
divine  compensations  which  never  visit  the  self- 
centred.  There  is  no  room  for  them  to  enter, 
when  the  door  is  shut  upon  the  duties  and 
demands  of  human  sympathy. 

(3)  Moral  humility  is  another  qualification  for 
the  experience  of  God's  higher  compensations. 
When  Paul  speaks  of  the  God  who  comforts  the 
lowly,  he  means  that  it  is  only  the  unassuming  and 
humble  who  can  receive  this  gift  of  God.  It  is 
easy  to  become  moody  and  bitter  when  people 
disappoint  us  and  work  seems  temporarily  useless. 
We  may  feel  we  scarcely  deserved  to  be  treated 
in  this  way,  and  resentment  against  our  fellow- 
creatures  may  slip  into  a  sullen  apathy  or  a 
nervous  fear  that  God  is  not  looking  after  us 
properly.  We  are  lowered,  but  we  are  not  lowly. 
We  come  down  in  the  world  or  suffer  some  priva- 
tion or  defeat.  But  it  makes  us  secretly  chafe 
under  the  discipline. 

Sensible  people  sometimes  try  to  overcome  this 
petulance  by  dwelling  grimly  on  its  absurdity. 
How  unreasonable,  they  argue,  to  expect  much 
from  human  nature  !  How  stupid  for  puny  man 
to    protest    against    the  dealings  of  the    Infinite 


THE   COMPENSATIONS   OF   GOD  183 

Power  which  is  over  all  human  concerns.  But,  if 
this  reading"  of  life  cleans  out  our  petty  pride,  it 
fails  to  put  in  any  moral  comfort.  We  need  a  more 
Christian  view  of  the  situation,  and  Paul  defines 
it  by  saying  that  the  only  secure  position  is  the 
humble  mind  which  makes  no  bargains  with  God, 
which  realizes  that  we  are  God's,  here  for  His 
ends  and  not  for  our  own,  here  as  His  soldiers  and 
servants.  Strenuous  souls  are  sometimes  tempted 
to  feel  that  their  unselfish  efforts  have  gone  for 
nothing,  and  that  there  is  no  moral  meaning  in  the 
world.  /  have  laboured  in  vain,  they  cry  with  the 
author  of  the  forty-ninth  chapter  of  Isaiah ;  /  have 
spent  my  strength  for  nought.  It  is  a  dangerous 
mood  to  cherish.  But,  as  they  are  strong,  they  will 
sooner  or  later  pick  up  courage  and  wisdom  to 
add  :  Yet  surely  my  recomfence  is  with  my  God. 
Honest  service  is  not  thrown  away.  There  is  a 
God  who  notes  how  men  bear  themselves,  and  who 
takes  account  of  their  dutifulness.  If,  during  the 
course  of  the  long  campaign,  whose  plan  is  not 
disclosed  to  us  beforehand  in  its  details,  our 
regiment  is  left  for  a  time  without  orders,  under 
a  dropping  fire,  there  must  be  some  reason  for  it. 
Faith  has  enough  heroism  to  stay  where  it  is  put, 
and  to  await  God's  justification  of  what  has  trans- 
pired. We  can  at  least  believe  that  it  is  not  for 
us  to  question  or  to  withdraw,  in  an  aggrieved  fit 
of  petulance,  muttering  hard  words  about  our 
treatment,  but  to  remain  wher<*  we  have  been  left 


1 84  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

until  further  orders  arrive.  Once  we  know  we  are 
at  our  post,  we  can  be  sure  that  our  General  on 
high  will  not  expose  us  to  unnecessary  loss  or 
prolong  the  strain  unduly. 

Even  under  the  untoward  discipline  we  get 
reminders  of  His  thoughtf ulness,  if  we  are  careful 
to  notice  them.  Cowper,  who  knew  from  experi- 
ence the  black  hours  of  despondency  that  occa- 
sionally visit  life,  put  the  whole  secret  into  the 
first  words  of  the  Olney  hymn — 

"Sometimes  a  light  surprises 

The  Christian  while  he  sings." 

The  relief  of  God  generally  surprises  life  along 
that  line.  It  is  the  cheerful,  not  the  grumbling 
and  defiant,  who  receive  the  compensations  of 
God's  comfort.  Those  who  are  trying  pluckily  to 
make  the  best  of  things  and  refusing  to  let  their 
faith  in  God  break  down,  those  who  will  fail,  if 
need  be,  with  a  smile  and  a  cheer — it  is  they  who 
are  visited  by  God's  rallying  encouragements,  as 
they  swing  with  their  three  anchors  out,  a  memory 
of  God's  word,  a  temper  of  unselfishness,  and  a 
humble,  resolute  conscience  for  their  immediate 
duty. 

Take,  for  example,  our  friendships.  Paul  real- 
ized at  this  time  what  an  unspeakable  solace  it  is  to 
have  a  reliable  friend.  No  doubt  it  was  the  good 
news  from  Corinth  which  relieved  the  apostle's 
anxiety,  but  often  it  is  not  anything  our  friend 


THE   COMPENSATIONS   OF  GOD  185 

brings  which  helps  us.  It  is  just  himself.  When 
we  say  good-bye  to  a  friend,  after  he  has  been 
sitting  with  us,  we  are  sometimes  inclined  to  say 
to  ourselves  what  Paul  said  about  Titus  :  God 
comforted  me  by  his  coming.  He  may  have  said 
nothing  about  religion.  Perhaps  he  was  uncon- 
scious of  our  special  trouble.  His  visit  may  have 
been,  in  our  phrase,  casual.  But  his  presence,  the 
sense  that  he  is  our  friend,  his  power  of  taking 
us  out  of  ourselves  and  making  us  feel  that,  after 
all,  we  are  not  isolated  units — all  this  forms  one 
of  God's  direct  compensations  to  us.  We  go  back 
to  face  our  life,  heartened  and  uplifted.  It  helps 
us  to  go  through  what  we  have  to  bear,  if  we  can 
feel  sure  that  we  have  two  or  three  friends  upon 
whose  loyalty  and  sympathy  we  can  absolutely  rely. 
God,  who  comforteth  the  lowly,  comforted  us  by 
the  coming  of  Titus.  The  incident  of  a  friend's 
visit  may  be  part  of  God's  large  providence  of 
encouragement.  Titus  comes  in  many  ways. 
James  Smetham  closes  a  letter  with  thanks  to  a 
friend  for  writing  to  him  when  he  happened  to  be 
depressed.  "  Glad  to  get  your  friendly  letter.  It 
was  like  the  coming  of  Titus.  I  think  Providence 
in  these  days  often  sends  Titus  by  post."  But 
whether  our  friends  rally  us  by  personal  inter- 
course or  by  correspondence,  the  great  point  is  to 
recognize  in  them  one  of  the  divine  compensa- 
tions. This  does  not  mean  any  obtrusive  use  of 
religious  language  about  the  matter,     You  may  feel 


186  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

that  you  cannot  speak  about  your  friends  exactly 
as  Paul  spoke  about  Titus.  You  rightly  shrink 
from  the  danger  of  falling  into  cant  and  unctuous- 
ness ;  you  protest  that  it  would  not  be  natural  for 
you  to  drag  God's  name  into  these  simple  and 
charming  relations  of  companionship  which  mean 
so  much  to  you.  But  it  isn't  a  question  of 
language,  it's  a  question  of  spirit.  What  we  must 
do  is  to  recognize  gladly  that  the  moving  of  one 
heart  to  another  is  the  work  of  God.  He  it  is  who 
prompts  these  instincts  of  thoughtf  ulness  and  affec- 
tion and  loyalty.  It  is  not  by  accident  that  you  and 
your  friend  come  together.  Your  life  and  his  do 
not  cross  and  intertwine  at  random.  The  mutual 
interests,  the  exchange  of  thought,  the  moral 
stimulus,  the  close  intimacy,  the  confidence  which 
you  enjoy  in  your  friend,  the  affinities  that  draw 
men  and  women  together  across  differences  of  age 
and  position,  are  a  wonderful  providence.  And 
they  seldom  seem  so  wonderful  or  so  divine  as 
when  they  help  us,  in  some  difficult  hour,  to 
compose   our   minds   and   keep   our   footing. 

Without  were  fightings,  within  were  fears. 
Nevertheless — the  compensations  of  God  surprise 
us  on  this  side  and  on  that.  Nevertheless  he  who 
comforteth  the  lowly,  even  God,  comforted  us  by 
the  coming  of  Titus.  There  are  good  reasons  for 
holding  to  our  faith.  Nevertheless  !  Against  dis- 
advantages and  hardships  there  is  something  to  be 
set.     Things   come   together   against    us,    things 


THE   COMPENSATIONS   OF   GOD  187 

press  on  us,  we  have  sleepless  nights  and  anxious 
days.  Nevertheless — God!  That  is  our  supreme 
compensation,  God's  presence  living  and  moving 
through  it  all.  Fightings  and  fears  cannot  prevent 
Him  from  reaching  behind  the  welter  of  circum- 
stances and  the  unrest  of  inward  fears  to  rally  the 
dutiful  and  the  devout  who  are  resolved  that,  come 
what  may,  they  will  on  no  account  surrender.  His 
compensations  are  abroad  and  at  work  on  our 
behalf.  Nothing  can  keep  them  from  us.  Nothing 
in  heaven  or  on  earth  can  hinder  their  arrival. 

"  Hast  not  thy  share  ?  on  winged  feet, 
Lo,  it  rushes  thee  to  meet; 
And  all  that  Nature  made  thy  own, 
Floating  in  air  or  pent  in  stone, 
Will  rive  the  hills  and  swim  the  sea, 
And,  like  thy  shadow,  follow  tl}ee." 

Without  are  fightings,  within  are  fears.  N ever- 
theless — God  ! 


XX 

LOVE'S  LABOUR 


The  Lord  will  perfect  that  which  concerneth  me : 
Thy  mercy,  O  Lord,  endure th  for  ever j 
Forsake  ?iot  the  works  of  thine  own  hands. 

Ps.  exxxviii.  8. 


XX 

LOVES  LABOUR 

Observe,  in  these  three  lines,  how  the  human 
soul  can  manage  to  rise  above  misgivings  and  dis- 
couragement. First,  it  is  able  to  make  a  general 
statement  about  God  :  The  Lord  will  perfect  that 
which  concerneth  me.  This  is  one  of  those  argu- 
ments from  history  and  experience  which  underlie 
all  religious  faith.  Such  belief  is  a  direct  relief, 
because  it  assures  us  that  God  is  concerned  on  our 
behalf  and  alive  to  our  highest  interests.  But  a 
general  statement  of  belief  is  never  quite  the  same 
as  a  formula.  The  confidence  that  God  will 
persevere  with  us  naturally  rises  into  a  cry  of  adora- 
tion and  praise,  addressed  to  God  Himself  :  Thy 
lovingkindness,  O  Lord,  lasts  for  ever.  A  believ- 
ing man  never  makes  any  declaration  about  God 
without  being  inwardly  moved.  He  has  an 
intuition  that  his  creed  ought  to  be  capable  of 
being  sung  or  prayed,  and  therefore,  as  he  speaks 
about  his  God,  he  instinctively  speaks  to  Him. 
Then  adoration  prompts  an  appeal.  Forsake  not 
the  works  of  thine  own  hands.  A  man  has  some- 
thing to  say  about  God ;  then  he  has  something  to 

191 


1 92  REASONS  AND    REASONS 

say  to  God;  and  finally  he  has  something  to  ask 
from  God. 

(i)  It  is  taken  for  granted  that  we  are  willing 
to  allow  God  to  finish  His  purpose  in  our  lives. 
The  Lord  will  perfect  that  which  concerneth  me. 
Faith  cannot  associate  God  with  work  half  done, 
and  yet  our  ideas  of  His  precise  purpose,  and  our 
conceptions  of  what  His  methods  should  be,  are 
often  extremely  imperfect.  His  end  in  our  life 
is  the  development  of  our  characters  into  His  own 
likeness;  that  object,  the  creation  of  moral  and 
spiritual  personalities,  explains  His  discipline  as 
nothing  else  can  do.  Our  concerns  are  often 
details  of  health  or  fortune,  personal  enjoyment 
or  ambitions  for  ourselves  and  our  families. 
These  engage  our  thoughts  and  occupy  our  minds. 
They  are  not  always  irrelevant  to  God's  plan  for 
us,  nor  to  be  brushed  aside  in  an  excess  of  spiritual 
fervour.  Your  heavenly  Father  knowelh  that  you 
have  need  of  stich  things.  But  it  may  not  be  for 
our  highest  good  to  have  these  hopes  and  wishes 
gratified  exactly  as  we  would  like.  Though  I 
walk  in  the  midst  of  trouble,  this  psalmist  wrote, 
thou  wilt  revive  me;  thy  right  hand  shall  save  me. 
The  road  to  a  finished  life  may  lie  through  the 
country  of  trouble,  and  not  exclusively  across  a 
smooth  experience  where  everything  is  to  our 
mind,  and  where  little  or  nothing  occurs  to  ruffle 
our  circumstances  or  upset  our  plans.  After  all, 
our  highest  concerns  are  those  of  character,  and 


LOVE'S   LABOUR  193 

any  one  who  knows  anything  about  the  soul  knows 
that  there  are  lessons,  finishing  touches,  ripening 
experiences  for  modesty  and  prayer  and  courage, 
which  are  never  learnt  so  well  as  in  the  days  of 
enforced  patience  and  disappointed  hopes,  when 
we  discover  that  happiness  is  not  the  greatest  thing 
in  life. 

Unless  we  are  prepared  to  look  at  things  in  this 
light,  we  cannot  argue  :  The  Lord  will  perfect  that 
which  concerneth  me.  We  need  to  give  Him  the 
right  to  work  with  us  and  for  us.  We  must  be 
ready  to  let  Him  bring  out  the  best  in  us;  which 
may  mean  that  He  does  not  spare  us  phases  of 
discipline  which  we  would  gladly  forego,  and  that 
He  may  have  to  withhold  from  us  what  we  had 
secretly  set  our  heart  upon.  Only,  once  we  sur- 
render our  wills  to  His  labour  of  love,  though  our 
faith  may  be  as  yet  unimposing  and  our  characters 
unformed,  for  us,  as  for  the  green  corn  in  the 
furrow  and  the  bud  upon  the  bough,  every  day 
will  steadily  do  something. 

(2)  When  he  realizes  this,  a  man  turns  to  his 
God  with  adoring  confidence  :  Thy  lovingkind- 
nessy  O  Lord,  endureth  for  ever. 

Lovingkindness  is  a  better  rendering  than  mercy. 
The  word  corresponds,  according  to  Robertson 
Smith,  "  to  the  Latin  ftietas,  or  dutiful  love,  as 
it  shows  itself  in  acts  of  kindliness  and  loyal 
affection.  It  is  a  word  of  common  life  used  of 
all    those    acts    which    acknowledge    that    those 


i94  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

who     are     linked    together    by    the    bonds    of 
personal  affection  or  of  social  unity  owe  to  one 
another  more  than  can  be  expressed  in  the  forms 
of  legal  obligation."    Well,  this  is  a  quality  which 
is    apt   to    pass    too    quickly    from    our   interest 
in  each  other;  it  is  the  quality  of  a  large  and 
generous  patience  which  will  not  stop  at  the  mere 
letter  of  obligation,  which  repeatedly  will  make 
due  allowance  for  defects  and  persevere  in  spite 
of  ingratitude  or  misconception.     Faults  some- 
times take  a  long  time  to  disappear,  and  good 
habits  are  so  slow  of  formation,  that  we  are  prone 
to  grow  tired  of  being  responsible  for  others,  or 
tired  at  any  rate  of  doing  more  for  them  than  is  in 
the  bond.     Yet  no  one  can  succeed  in  rousing  or 
training  a  human  soul,  without  an  immense  amount 
of  sheer  patience  and  ungrudging  forbearance. 
Unless  we  have  the  capacity  for  putting  up  with 
crudity  and  petulance,  and  of  keeping  our  temper 
when  people  are  dull  or  slow,  we  can  do  very 
little  in  the  way  of  educating  or  ennobling  them. 
Half  the  power  of  moral  education,  for  example, 
lies  in  the  faculty  of  seeing  where  faults  really 
contain  some  germ  of  goodness,  and  where  they 
are  the  rough  expression  of  what  may  turn  out, 
under  proper   training,    to   be    a   virtue.      That 
capacity  of  insight,  together  with  a  strong  belief 
in  the  possibility  of  growth  and  manliness,  is  what 
mainly  helps  younger  natures  to  ripen.     They 
need   to   be  made   to   feel   that  our  interest  in 


LOVE'S   LABOUR  195 

them   is   more   than   mechanical    or   punitive   or 
professional. 

Now  the  standing  wonder  of  our  lives  is  that 
God  deals  with  them  in  this  large  and  disinter- 
ested   spirit,    patient    with    their   obvious    short- 
comings and  also  with  their  unwise  zeal.    His  tie 
with  us  is  not  a  legal  compact.    There  is  a  prayer 
attributed  by  tradition  to  Queen  Elizabeth  :  "  O 
Lord,  look  upon  the  wounds  of  Thy  hands,  and 
forsake  not  the  works  of  Thy  hands."     It  is  a 
sentence  which  expresses  the  order  of  the  Chris- 
tian's confidence  in  God.    He  who  began  the  good 
work  began  it  on  the  Cross.     We  dare  not  pre- 
sume, but  we  can  count  upon  His  loyal  kindness 
and  His  unfailing  mercy,  upon  His  knowledge  of 
when  we  need  to  be  punished  or  disappointed, 
upon  His  unerring  sight  of  any  promise  in  our 
faulty  natures.    The  Cross  of  Jesus  is  our  supreme 
reason  for  this  belief  in  His  perseverance.     It 
ratifies  the  conviction  that  the  footing  on  which 
God  stands  to  us  is  broader  than  any  legal  obliga- 
tion.   It  is  of  the  Lord's  mercies  that  we  are  not 
consumed.    His  compassions  fail  not.    The  long- 
suffering  of  the  Lord,  is  our  salvation.    He  who 
began  a  good  work  in  you  will  perfect  it  unto  the 
day  of  Christ.    It  is  not  His  way  to  throw  up  the 
work  when  it  grows  difficult  and  exacting.     We 
can  hold  to  that  thought  of  Him,  and  glory  in  it, 
when  we  consider  all  that  went  before  the  Cross 
and  all  that  has  come  after. 


196  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

(3)  The  thought  passes  involuntarily  into  a 
prayer  :  Forsake  not  the  works  of  thine  own  hands. 
Forsake  them  not :  do  not  discard  them,  do  not 
drop  them,  like  a  craftsman  tired  of  his  task  or 
disappointed  with  all  that  he  has  been  able  to 
make  of  his  materials. 

It  is  an  appeal,  we  might  almost  say,  to  God's 
interest  on  the  one  hand,  and  to  His  sense  of 
responsibility  on  the  other.  Such  an  appeal  was 
natural  in  the  ancient  East,  where  skill  and  craft 
were  largely  personal  accomplishments,  which  led 
the  workman  to  take  a  special  pride  in  what  his 
hands  had  stamped  as  his  and  turned  out  as  a 
proof  of  his  artistic  genius.  So,  says  the  psalmist, 
there  is  a  personal  tie  between  God  and  man,  His 
handiwork;  all  that  is  best  in  our  lives  is  His;  it 
is  He  who  has  made  us — at  what  cost  of  thought 
and  toil ! — and  not  we  ourselves;  He  surely  will 
not  give  us  up. 

"  Longsuffering  and  most  patient  God, 
Thou  needst  be  surelier  God  to  bear  with  us 
Than  even  to  have  made  us." 

There  is  a  line  in  the  great  mediaeval  hymn, 
the  "  Dies  Irse,"  which  Dr.  Johnson  could  not  hear 
or  read  without  profound  emotion ;  it  is  one  of  the 
.  appeals  to  God  on  the  last  day,  Tantus  labor  non 
sit  cassus :  "  Let  not  all  Thy  labour  go  for 
nothing. "  We  feel  this  strongly  as  believers  in 
Jesus    Christ,    and    the    feeling    enters    into   our 


LOVE'S   LABOUR  197 

reasons  for  believing  in  immortality.  It  con- 
tradicts our  ideas  of  God  to  think  that  human 
character,  with  the  moral  and  spiritual  qualities 
which  His  creative  power  and  redeeming  grace ;  - 
have  wrought  out,  should  be  liable  to  dissolution 
equally  with  the  transient  forms  of  matter.  In  the 
light  of  Jesus  Christ  we  cannot  bring  ourselves  to 
sum  up  God's  work  as  Love's  Labour  Lost.  We 
have  an  instinct  that  He  will  not  suffer  the  need- 
less waste  which  would  be  inevitable  if  our  moral 
attainments  and  activities  collapsed  with  the  death 
of  the  body.  It  is  a  genuine  intimation  of  immor- 
tality when  we  realize  that  the  higher  life  of 
obedience  and  trust  in  man  is  ultimately  the  work 
of  God's  spirit  labouring  through  time  and  space. 

Naturally  the  worth  and  value  of  this  argument 
rest  on  our  present  attitude  of  personal  submission 
to  His  will  as  the  supreme  reality  in  life.  We 
dare  not  pray  unreservedly  :  Forsake  not  the  works 
of  my  hands.  Our  sole  right  to  fall  back  upon 
God's  responsibility  is  derived  from  the  absolute 
trust  with  which  we  are  allowing  Him  to  mould 
and  control  our  lives.  What  reality  could  there 
be  even  in  praying,  Forsake  not  the  works  of  thine 
own  hands,  if  we  were  all  the  while  taking  things 
into  our  own  hands  and  shaping  our  own  ends, 
regardless  of  His  authority? 

And  yet,  how  often  we  do  thwart  His  purposes 
by  our  timidity  or  self-conceit !  There  is  an  old 
Greek  legend  about  Demeter  desiring  to  make  her 


198  REASONS   AND   REASONS 

foster-child  immortal.  She  managed  to  begin  her 
divine  task  by  laying  him  within  the  fire  upon  the 
hearth.    And 

"All  night  long  amid  the  flames  he  lay, 
Upon  the  hearth,  and  played  with  them  and  smiled." 

But  the  mother  one  night  awoke  and,  screaming 
to  see  her  babe  apparently  being  injured,  she 
snatched  it  from  what  she  imagined  was  its  cruel 
doom.  The  kindly  purpose  of  the  goddess  was 
thwarted  by  the  human  interposition,  and  the  boy 
grew  up  to  be  no  more  than  mortal.  A  legend? 
Yes,  but  a  parable  of  the  way  in  which  some 
people  may  contrive  to  hurt  their  souls  by  rashly 
and  timidly  interfering  with  what  God  would  make 
of  them,  or  by  withdrawing  their  characters  as  far 
as  possible  from  the  fire  of  experiences  which 
apparently  are  punishing.  There  is  such  a  thing 
as  being  perfected  through  suffering.  It  was  on 
the  Cross  that  Jesus  said,  //  is  finished,  and  we 
ought  not  to  feel  surprised  if  God  occasionally 
has  to  plunge  us  into  fiery  trials.  What  will  really 
hurt  us  is  to  decline  them,  not  to  endure  them. 
Let  us  not  undo  what  He  is  carrying  out.  Never, 
by  cowardice  or  impatience,  be  so  short-sighted 
as  to  thwart  His  will.  Pull  yourself  together  to 
believe  that  even  in  strange  dealings  and  dark 
hours  He  must  be  bent  on  executing  some 
immortal  design,  and  that  the  passing  hardship 
may  turn  out  to  be  the  truest  kindness.     Let  the 


LOVE'S   LABOUR  i99 

Lord  do  what  seemeth  to  Him  good.  It  is  good, 
whatever  it  may  seem  to  you  in  the  heat  and  the 
confusion  of  the  moment.  Let  Him  have  His 
way  with  you;  it  will  be  the  way  of  Him  who, 
having  loved  his  own  that  are  in  the  world,  loves 
them  to  the  end. 


THE   END 


Richard  Clay  &  Sons,  Limited, 

brunswick  street,  stamford  street,  s.e., 

and  bungay,  suffolk. 


Date  Due 

tc  %8* 

'  ~^T%6&»c«». 

*C 

f 

W **—** 

« **,r»^«£^a» 

$ 

1 

1    1012  01026  4200 


